This Essay is in complement to Cécile Fromont’s Images on a Mission in Early Modern Kongo and Angola (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2022). Clicking on the figures in this article will bring readers to galleries containing further images from the works in which they feature. 

In my book, Images on a Mission in Early Modern Central Africa, I study for the first time the visual project that Capuchin Franciscan friars devised and implemented in and about central Africa between 1650 and 1750.1 As part of their activities in Kongo and Angola, the friars created dozens of images and wrote hundreds of pages of text in works that they called "practical guides."2  The visual or textual compendia were meant to teach the missionaries that would follow in the veterans’ footsteps about the specificities of central Africa, from its natural environment to its political landscape, to the range of its religious practices from Roman Catholicism to what the friars perceived as heathenry and idolatry.

In Images on a Mission, I discuss how the Capuchin didactic images form a unique and exceptionally important corpus that enriches our knowledge of central Africa and dramatically multiplies the European-format visual record about the African continent before 1800. I also demonstrate that the corpus transforms our understanding of early modern global interactions in several ways. First, it brings to the fore the Capuchin missionary project of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that has remained largely unstudied, although it was every bit as broad and ambitious as the contemporaneous, robustly investigated Jesuit and Franciscan apostolic ventures. Further, it highlights a set of spiritual and epistemological interactions between Africans and Europeans unfolding outside of a colonial context. The Capuchins worked in the already Christian kingdom of Kongo as well as in many, for the most part independent, polities such as Matamba, Ndongo, or the Ndembo area in Angola, a toponym the Portuguese coined in the sixteenth century from a local royal title that referred to a region extending over the northern two-thirds of the modern namesake country (Fig. 1).3

• 1
  Cécile Fromont, Images on a Mission in Early Modern Kongo and Angola (Penn State University Press, 2022).
• 2
  About these practical guides see Cécile Fromont, “Nature, Culture, and Faith in Seventeenth-Century Kongo and Angola: The Parma Watercolors Texts,” MAVCOR Journal 6, no. 1 (2022).
• 3
  About the geography and history of the region see John K. Thornton, A History of West Central Africa to 1850, vol. 14 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), introduction.

Far from acting as the religious arm of a colonial project, except in the thin enclave of Portuguese Angola, the friars operated in this geography at the demand, and under the supervision of local powers. They had to adhere to the pre-existing organization, rituals, and tenets of the more than century-old church of the Kongo, and worked in both Kongo and Angola alongside central African scholars and specialists who were essential, and in some cases principal, actors leading the knowledge-making and knowledge-gathering enterprise at the core of the corpus they assembled.

The Capuchin central African vignettes are thus expressions of a discourse about nature, culture, and faith that friars and the people of Kongo and Angola co-constructed in the course of their interactions. They are, in this view, not European conceived and executed pictures of the region and its inhabitants, but pictures from central Africa, molded in the dialogue that unfolded between the friars and central Africans. In analyzing the unique, fraught yet collaborative relationship between friars and central Africans from which the Capuchin images and texts emerged, Images on a Mission probes the mechanics of cross-cultural religious change and knowledge-creation in the early modern period. It analyses the nature, process, and limits of Catholic conversion and the fluid contours of orthodoxy drawn in the confrontations and negotiations unfolding among a heterogeneous cast of European and African priests, local church leaders, devout Christians, apostates, heathens, and cynics. It also enriches our grasp of the cross-cultural dimension of early modern (visual) natural history in offering examples of knowledge honed in the meeting and integration of classical, biblical, and other European written and oral sources with African ideas and modes of experimentation. The page of the Parma Watercolors holding the fantastical manatee pictured as a woman-fish after its Portuguese name and fame of peixe-mulher also recorded, for instance, the anti-hemorrhagic use of the animal’s ribs that friars learned from central African “surgeons” (Fig. 2). 

A primary goal of Images on a Mission is to reveal and emphasize the cross-cultural dimension of images such as the Capuchins’ that, though concerned with the extra-European world, are of European form, created for European viewers, and, at least nominally, by European image-makers. To do so, it takes an approach that considers the circumstances of the images’ creation, i.e. the cross-cultural encounters, broadly defined, from which they emerged, as their actual author. This method sheds long overdue light on visual productions such as the Capuchin central African images whose cross-cultural dimension has otherwise remained all but invisible to their original viewers as well as to later scholars. In the Capuchin corpus, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century image-makers did not name or mention the local scholars and interlocutors who shaped the content of their compositions, in effect silencing their contributions. In turn, twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholars have been poorly equipped to recognize and acknowledge cross-cultural interventions in visual documents when their traces are not visible at the level of form or documented in the biography of their maker, or when it has been naturalized to the point of becoming invisible.4 Considering the circumstances of the images’ creation as holding authorial agency allows to lift this double veil. It points to the cross-cultural dialogues that underlay their making and it invites analyses that see them no longer as wholly European images of central Africa, but as images from central Africa and molded by central Africans in dialogue with Europeans.   

Most of the watercolors and ink drawings that emerged from the Capuchin central African missions have confounded interpretation and remained unpublished in their own times as well as in ours. Images on a Mission analyzes the reasons these images have been so baffling and the consequences of the challenges they posed to viewers, censors, and editors in the seventeenth century as well as to scholars in the twentieth and twenty-first century. This Essay, however, focuses on the limited number of prints linked to the Capuchin central African images that did see the printing press, principally as part of Friar Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi da Montecuccolo’s Istorica Descrizione de’ tre regni Congo, Matamba et Angola. Published in Bologna in 1687 after a long and complex publication process, this book remains the most important source for central African history to this day.5  This Essay also addresses related imagery published shortly after in another publication, Girolamo Merolla da Sorrento’s Breve, e svccinta relatione del viaggio nel regno di Congo nell’ Africa meridionale (Napoli, 1692).6

• 4
  Cécile Fromont, “Penned by Encounter: Visibility and Invisibility of the Cross-Cultural in Images from Early Modern Franciscan Missions in Central Africa and Central México,” Renaissance Quarterly 75, no. 4 (2022): 1221-1265; Carolyn Dean and Dana Leibsohn, “Hybridity and Its Discontents: Considering Visual Culture in Colonial Spanish America,” Colonial Latin American Review 12, no. 1 (2003): 5-35.
• 5
  Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi and Fortunato Alamandini, Istorica descrizione de’ tre regni Congo, Matamba et Angola sitvati nell' Etiopia inferiore occidentale e delle missioni apostoliche esercitateui da religiosi Capuccini (Bologna: Giacomo Monti, 1687). About the publication process see Francisco Leite de Faria, “João António Cavazzi: a sua obra e a sua vida,” in Descrição histórica dos três reinos do Congo, Matamba e Angola, ed. Graciano Maria de Leguzzano (Lisboa: Junta de Investigações do Ultramar, 1965).
• 6
  Girolamo Merolla da Sorrento and Angelo Piccardo, Breve, e svccinta relatione del viaggio nel regno di Congo nell’ Africa meridionale, fatto dal P. Girolamo Merolla da Sorrento . . . Continente variati clima, arie, animali, fiumi, frutti, vestimenti con proprie figure, diuersita di costumi, e di viueri per l’vso humano (Napoli: Per F. Mollo, 1692).

Friar Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi, a native of the region of Modena, served as a missionary in central Africa, principally in the lands of queen Njinga, between 1654 and 1667. He had just returned to Italy after a long journey through Brazil when, in 1669, the cardinals of the Propaganda Fide, the papal institution for the propagation of the faith, commissioned from him a history of the Capuchin mission to central Africa. His long experience in the region and his reputation as a prolific writer and image-maker made him a good candidate for the task. He immediately set to work. In addition to the documents he had brought back with him from Angola, he consulted the Roman archives, the meager published material on the region, and the writings of his fellow friars.7 He soon produced a manuscript that, in 1671, failed to obtain the Propaganda Fide’s approval for its publication due to the cost of printing such a lengthy book. When Cavazzi set off for his second stay in central Africa in 1673, he left his book in the hands of his brother in religion, Bonaventura da Montecuccolo, who was to pursue printing in Bologna with an alternate source of funding. The project moved forward until the text and images that Cavazzi had commissioned from friar Paolo da Lorena met the opposition of the censors because of the miracles they described. The manuscript was eventually entrusted to Fortunato Alamandini da Bologna, a Capuchin who never travelled to central Africa, for editing in 1678. After years of revision and further review the book was approved for publication in 1684 and finally published in 1687.8

• 7
  Texts published before Cavazzi’s writing of the Istorica descrizione include the Capuchin volumes Antonio da Gaeta and Francesco Maria Gioia, La maravigliosa conversione alla santa fede di Cristo della regina Singa e del svo regno di Matamba nell’Africa meridionale, descritta con historico stile (Napoli: G. Passaro, 1669); Dionigi de Carli da Piacenza and Michael Angelo de Guattini Reggio, Viaggio del P. Dionigi de’ Carli da Piacenza e del P. Michel Angelo De’Guattini da Reggio Capuccini, Predicatori e missionari Apostolici nel Regno del Congo (Reggio: Prospero Vedrotti, 1671); and Duarte Lopes and Filippo Pigafetta, Relatione del reame di Congo et delle circonvicine contrade, tratta dalli scritti & ragionamenti di Odoardo Lopez, Portoghese (Roma: Appresso B. Grassi, 1591).
• 8
  About the history of publication of the book see Faria, “João António Cavazzi,” xxv-xxxi.

The final version of the book includes fifty-one copper plate engravings and etchings. Most of the prints are the creation of Paolo da Lorena from Cavazzi’s commission of the early 1670s, including the frontispiece signed “F. Paul.s a Lothar.a Cap. Sculp” (Fig. 3). Fortunato Alamandini conceived and proudly signed eight others “F. Fort°. f.f.” as corrective to what he deemed the “weak” images of friar Paolo, which he had hoped to replace altogether, but was not able to do so for lack of funds (see for example Fig. 4).9

• 9
  Cavazzi and Alamandini, Istorica descrizione de' tre regni Congo, Matamba et Angola sitvati nell’ Etiopia inferiore occidentale e delle missioni apostoliche esercitateui da religiosi Capuccini, n.p., 3rd page of foreword. See table in Fromont, Images on a Mission, 26.

Most of the images in Cavazzi’s Istorica descrizione, whether designed by Paolo da Lorena and Cavazzi, or recreated by Alamandini, have deep roots in the corpus of didactic Capuchin manuscripts, whose format and style many of them share. Only fifteen derive entirely or in part from paintings that Cavazzi composed in the 1660s for an earlier work which was not one of the practical guides, the Missione Evangelica also known as the Araldi Manuscript, covering similar topics as the Istorica descrizione (compare for instance Fig. 5 & Fig. 6).10

• 10
  Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi, Missione Evangelica al Regno del Congo: Araldi Manuscript, Biblioteca Estense (Modena, 1665-1668). About the Araldi manuscript see Giuseppe Pistoni, “I manoscritti ‘Araldi’ di padre Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi da Montecuccolo,” Atti e momorie della Academia Nazionale di Scienze, Leterre e Arti di Modena 6, no. 11 (1969); Ezio Bassani and Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi, Un Cappuccino nell'Africa nera del Seicento: i disegni dei Manoscritti Araldi del Padre Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi da Montecuccolo, Quaderni Poro, 4 (Milano: Associazione “Poro,” 1987), John Kelly Thornton, “Translation of the Araldi Manuscript,” (n.d.).

Thirty-three, however, are especially close to one of the didactic manuscripts, the Parma Watercolors created circa 1663-1690.11  The relationship between the two is not directly that of original and copy, but rather one of belonging to a common visual milieu, likely through the existence of a third, common source, until now unidentified and likely no longer extant. The prints and watercolors present to their viewers almost identical scenes, such as that of a funeral ceremony (Figs. 7 & 8) or a manatee, the latter also featuring in Merolla’s Breve . . . relatione, discussed below (Figs. 2, 9-11).12

• 11
  Fromont, “Nature, Culture, and Faith.”
• 12
  For a longer discussion of this see Fromont, Images on a Mission, chapter 1 and 2.

The image network in which Cavazzi’s Istorica Descrizione participated also included visual material outside of the Capuchin orbit. Seven of the designs are connected to Duarte Lopes and Filippo Pigafetta’s earlier and very successful volume on central Africa, the 1591 Relatione del reame del Congo et delle circonvicine contrade. The Relatione was an edition by Italian cosmographer Pigafetta of the eyewitness testimony about central Africa of Duarte Lopes, a Portuguese merchant whom the king of Kongo made his ambassador to the papacy in the late sixteenth century (Figs. 12 & 13).13  The richly illustrated volume received much attention from contemporary viewers and was translated by the de Bry family of publishers and engravers into Latin and German later in the decade, with additional prints.14  Copies of the de Bry volumes were in Luanda at the time Cavazzi worked on his manuscripts.15

• 13
  Lopes and Pigafetta, Relatione del reame di Congo.
• 14
  Duarte Lopes, and Filippo Pigafetta, Regnvm Congo hoc est Warhaffte vnd Eigentliche Beschreibung deß Königreichs Congo in Africa, vnd deren angrentzenden Länder darinnen der Inwohner Glaub, Leben, Sitten vnd Kleydung . . . angezeigt wirdt (Frankfurt am Main: de Bry, 1597); Duarte Lopes, Regnvm Congo, hoc est, Vera descriptio regni Africani: qvod tam ab incolis qvam Lvsitanis Congus appellatur, trans. Filippo Pigafetta (Frankfurt am Main: Excudebat Wolffgangus Richter, 1598).
• 15
  Fromont, Images on a Mission, 445.

The relation of Girolamo Merolla da Sorrento’s travels to central Africa published in Naples in 1692 belongs to the same visual milieu that produced the prints in the Istorica descrizione. Its nineteen copper plates parallel and complement the prints and paintings in the Istorica descrizione and the Parma Watercolors. The volume, titled Breve, e Succinta Relatione del Viaggio nel Regno di Congo retells Merolla’s activities and experiences in Kongo and Angola between 1683 and 1688 as collected and written down by Angelo Piccardo da Napoli from oral interviews with the missionary after his return to Naples in 1689.16 No information about the commission and production of the copper plates included in the rapidly published volume has emerged so far. It is clear, however, that they share strong kinship with both the Istorica Descrizione and the Parma Watercolors. Merolla’s plates would have been created shortly after the publication of the former and the composition of the latter. The text, moreover, makes many direct or indirect references to the Istorica Descrizione, the publication of which received much attention. In 1690, a second edition of the Istorica descrizione, first published in Bologna in 1687, appeared in Milan, with copper plates copied closely from the first edition. This later, more modest version presented the vignettes bound between pages of text on short strips of paper. The rectangular illustrations were etched several to one large sheet of paper, and then cut into individual images.17  This was the first of many reeditions in several languages.18

• 16
  José Sarzi Amade, “Réédition, contextualisation et analyse de la Breve e Succinta Relatione del Viaggio nel Regno di Congo [. . .](1692) de Girolamo Merolla da Sorrento,” (Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, University of Aix-Marseille, 2016).
• 17
  Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi et al., Istorica descrittione de’ tre regni Congo, Matamba, et Angola: situati nell’Etiopia inferiore occidentale e delle missioni apostoliche esercitateui da religiosi Capuccini (Milan: Nelle Stampe dell’Agnelli, 1690).
• 18
  See Edouard d'Alençon, “Essai de Bibliographie Capucino-Congolaise,” Neerlandia Franciscana 1, no. 1 (1914): 262-265.

As outlined in table 2, some of the prints in Merolla have precedents in both the Cavazzi prints and the Parma Watercolors. Others have links to only one or the other of the works. Consider for example the scene of justice under the tree in Merolla’s plate 12 (Fig. 14) alongside the Istorica descrizione’s plate 24 (Fig. 15) , or the Parma Watercolors 27 (Fig. 16) While the three scenes of justice closely mirror one another, the tapping of palm wine in  number 17 in the sequence (Fig. 17), is echoed, distantly, in the Parma Watercolors 44 (Fig. 18) but does not feature in the Istorica descrizione. 

Others still have parallels in neither. Some have sources outside of the Capuchin central African realm, such as the banana tree in plate 3 (Fig. 19), which is close to the one in Lopes and Pigafetta(Fig. 20). Most of the vignettes without direct comparanda, however, follow templates that would easily fit within the missing pages of the Parma Watercolors, which, in their current state of conservation include 67 folios labelled from numbers 2 to 104, with lacunae. For example, the depiction of blacksmithing at the top of print 16 (Fig. 21) would have found its place alongside the Parma Watercolors depicting work and craft such as agriculture, folio 76r, cooking, folio 77r, or weaving, folio 79r. The compound at the top of print 14 (Fig. 22) would fit alongside the series on architecture starting with folios 23r and 24r, but missing two folios, numbers 25 and 26. The aristocratic man and woman at the bottom of the same print in Merolla, in turn, would insert itself well as the missing folio 69r preceding a similar representation of dress in folio 70r.

Notably, none of the prints in Merolla are linked to the Araldi manuscript or to vignettes in the Istorica descrizione inspired by it. This is a telling detail that suggests that Merolla or his editor Piccardo did not rely only or even principally on Cavazzi’s published tome in the creation of the prints. Rather, Merolla’s illustration program points to its origins in another set of visual models, linked to the Parma Watercolors. It thus stands as a significant piece in the visual jigsaw puzzle of the Capuchin visual production linked to their missions in Kongo and Angola.

The two tables below describe the interconnections between Cavazzi’s Istorica descrizione, Merolla’s Relatione, and other visual sources in the Capuchin visual corpus and beyond. Visual comparisons can be accessed by clicking on the image number. The images presented in this Essay are the best available at the time of publication, though not always completely satisfactory. The binding for Merolla’s Relatione is particularly tight in most extant copies, which makes scans or photographs of its illustrations challenging to produce. This issue has been compounded by the ongoing limitations on new imaging due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Essay assembled nonetheless serves its purpose of assembling, presenting, organizing, and inviting further attention to this important and understudied corpus of images.

In August 2020, Zoom was still something of a strange place. Like the gender performances we summoned as we spoke—the wife and the wifey, the artist and the influencer—Zoom evokes intimacy as well as expanse. Our contributions took us from the familiarity of scent to the spread of colonial space/time, pulling us into Black vernacular culture and “linking” us to divine power through the digital. As we saw our heads appearing side by side, Toronto (Suzanne van Geuns), New Haven (Dustin Gavin), and Hamilton (Ellen Amster) suddenly close enough to touch, we were struck by the ironies that stack up in the gender performances we discussed. Continually drawing in and refusing their audiences, they never quite stay fixed in the frame.

Gender performances as openings or windows—into colonial space/time, into Black vernacular culture, into divine power

Intimacy—of the body, its smells and familiarities, of affiliation and connection as gendered performances

Space—as calling on religious histories, gendered embodiment as enmeshment with space, as existing online in dynamics of perusing/browsing, as circulation in or out of control

Irony—gender performance and irony as something they become possible by taking on the perspective of the watching audience, humor as happening through being a gender and not being it, performances that are always removed from their audience, performances that are always already refusing any other perspective

Suus: [00:00:07] All right, go. We can start shining!

Ellen: [00:00:13] I can start. 

Suus: [00:00:15] Sure. 

Dustin: [00:00:16] Sure.

Ellen: [00:00:17] So my slide is about Lalla Essaydi, who is a Moroccan visual artist. Her name means Madam Sir, and she says explicitly in her artist’s statement that she draws on male languages of Orientalist painting and Islamic calligraphy in order to create women-centered art. I didn’t emphasize that in the slide because there wasn’t enough space. For religious studies, I focus on another aspect of her work, which is the ways in which she creates place. She calls her body a converging territory between east and west and between past and present. In her images, like the ones I showed you, the woman becomes part of the house: her clothing looks like the fabrics or the tile work in the house, so that she literally becomes part of the place. This is a realization of an Islamic concept, also demonstrated in Sufi shrines, in which a person becomes an opening to God in the world when they are buried. 

In terms of the ways in which I see our pieces fitting together, I see the common theme that the material of religion is about the body, representation of the body, the body and space. Suus has Bible hair accessories, Dustin has Wifey—a physical fragrance. Dustin also has a picture of Kim Kardashian’s body. And there’s an allusion to food with this little candy that she’s sitting on. In all these ways, the body or the processes of the body are being referred to through the rendering of the female body. The author is trying to define womanhood and women’s identity, getting to Suus’s point, but the author or artist is also translating a religious concept to the contemporary world through the body—making the abstract concrete. 

The themes I saw were biblical womanhood and the wifey: both a wife as a good wife and then also this different and somewhat historical concept of the wifey. And then the third theme is this idea of Sufi Islamic sacred. What is the sacred space? That’s it for me.

Suus: [00:03:12] That’s great, thank you. I’ll jump in here, because I see an interesting connection to what you wrote in your piece about the dead bodies of holy people as openings to God. The women I study will often say that their goal is for the blog to be less of them and more of Jesus, emphasizing that they are making themselves into a channel for divine power. When they pass on that divine power to other people, that’s a really good thing—the more they can make themselves into that kind of opening, the better. I think we can think about this in general terms. What sort of power comes from being a transmitter or a “link” to something else? A media question that is interesting in relation to Kim Kardashian, too. Is the wifey someone who gains power, or even just proximity to power, by being its window or its channel? 

Ellen: [00:04:43] Did you want to say a bit more about your piece?

Suus: [00:04:47] Oh, yeah, sure. I’m really interested in this idea of stickiness and affiliation, and the Internet as a place where that can be monetized and rewarded. These women fuse together and affiliate these different systems of circulation. One is the Internet economy, which works by installing cookies on a particular user and then those cookies will kind of survey the user as they browse online, bringing in money by following their movements. But there’s also religious circulation happening, with these women working to model and pass around something other than themselves. Their blog posts always repeat: “I find it actually very hard to smile at my husband, I need divine grace and intervention to be able to summon or model Christ for my husband in how I smile at him.” 

My interest is in how the coded layer of cookies fuses with the theological layer of saying this is how women should be. People often think that influencers are selling themselves. For the women I study, it’s very clear that they’re actually not selling the self so much as they’re selling their ability to be a link, their ability to affiliate. And I think that is a relevant distinction in religious economies, too. 

Dustin: [00:06:58] The one word that I think runs through all of our topics is intimacy. I’m thinking of what to do with how intimacy is gendered, and what religion may have to do with this gendered nature of being intimate. The choice to do Kim and the fragrance comes from how I think personally about fragrances and how important fragrances are to me. That is mostly about some intimacy with my own body, but also the bodies that I come in contact with. What does it mean to be an intimate body and to engage with other bodies? 

With Kim Kardashian in particular, what does it mean when all your engagement is your body? This is the example of smell, but what does it mean when you’re a body in constant engagement, the body as the pieces of your life? What does it mean to move through life and being this idea of a fleshy sort of body? I was also thinking about space and how we craft and mesh with spaces, how we become different spaces, how we become a space in between our different projects. In my mind, that flows through all of the projects, this idea of engaging with and becoming or being one with a space, and what that has to do with holiness and sacredness. What is sacred when you’re claiming a space?

Suus: [00:09:19] Yeah, that is really interesting. I am thinking now of the way these blogs are always saying “welcome and settle down with a cup of tea, come sit on my porch.” The blog is ostensibly a diary, a story of the self. Yet it also becomes a place where we go as we’re “surfing.” That is very thought-provoking for me—while blogs feel less physical, we do actually move from place to place online, and they are bounded sites in a network. 

Ellen: [00:09:55] Dustin, can you talk a little bit about your project? Why did you choose that particular image and that particular thing?

Dustin: [00:10:15] I picked the thing and the image as a nod to different ideas of nostalgia and memory. The heart candy—I’m also thinking about production and consumption and capitalism, and the heart candy taps into nostalgia. I have also been thinking a lot about intimacy and smell. A lot of my work is in reality TV. I deal with the Housewives franchise, and I’m always asking: What does it mean in the contemporary world to be a housewife? What is that role? How is that defined? 

The contrast between the housewife as an idea from Protestant Christianity and her claim to the role of wifey, in relation to how I came to understand the term “wifey,” is really interesting to me. I think she does embody that role, this idea and aesthetic of the ride-or-die chick. I wanted to play with the fact that this demarcation of the wifey is very much still wife, but remixed. It’s the colors of a wife, maybe with a different sort of texture. I wanted to play with whatever that texture is—what is it? What happens when we add that “y” at the end? Why does it change when the form is still the same? A lot of what Kim Kardashian does—she is a cultural reset sort of person, someone who does things that make you question the nature of terms. I wanted to question the term that she claimed, wifey, from a completely different sort of realm and world.

Suus: [00:13:02] The super white conservative Christian bloggers in my research would be upset at the “y” being necessary.

Dustin: [00:13:30] I think it’s also interesting to me precisely because the wifey is not a wife. Wifey is an attitude, it’s an idea. Your girlfriend can be wifey. I wanted to play with that a bit. She’s not exactly a wife, necessarily. I think her categorization is a bit broader than wife; she’s the person that you can depend on almost. Wifey’s almost like having your cake and eating it, too.

Ellen: [00:14:13] Is she part of the Kardashian appropriation of Black culture?

Dustin: [00:14:18] Oh definitely. The heart candies are now all words like bae; bae is something that was completely co-opted. I don’t remember a time I did not say bae. In the same way, I’ve never not known about having a squad. When it became a thing around early 2010 I was like, oh, that’s a thing now? To have a squad? I think it’s definitely a part of that conversation, a sort of sanitisation or a selling of Black popular vernacular culture. She’s definitely in that. 

But that’s also her engine—that's how she makes money. She does it so well, never saying too much. It’s always just a tag, it’s the wifey. Everything we’re doing with the term I’m making up, and she knows that we can do that. I think that’s what gives her space. She can just throw something out there and if she steps back from the crowd far enough—she’s always far enough from it that there’s nothing that happens with it.

Suus: [00:15:47] It’s an Internet thing, too, right? It’s not just Kim. It’s also that Black vernacular is a particular currency online. There’s this really cool book by André Brock, Distributed Blackness, about Black Twitter and Black Internet cultures and how they spread out. Maybe Kim as the influencer of all influencers has her own role in that ecosystem.

Ellen: [00:16:36] One last thought and then, unfortunately, I have to run to my student. In both of your projects, femininity or feminine identity is developed in relation to a man. This Lalla Essaydi character is part of a larger project on transvestism. I found that in colonial North Africa, there are all these transvestites, people dressing up as other genders, as other races. 

And then there’s all these postcolonial artists that use transvestism to deconstruct the category itself. On the one hand, Lalla Essaydi appropriates aspects of what has traditionally been male for a performance. That’s the thing about drag. It’s a performative identity, in which you, the viewer, know what’s supposed to be feminine and what’s supposed to be masculine and see that it’s all mashed up. Each of your projects relates to a man or the masculine, and involves performance. They’re all performing this gendered identity.

Suus: [00:18:47] What are responses to this artist’s work?

Ellen: [00:18:57] I think there are a lot of people who like it. I didn’t put this in my piece, but she’ll take a really famous painting, like the Odalisque, and restage it but with a real woman. The woman is wearing a white drape, so she doesn’t have her boobs hanging out, which is what the French painters always have. On the fabric, she writes pages of her own diary and calligraphy, in Arabic. And then the woman is just like looking at you, right? So instead of these drugged, blissed-out European paintings, you have this woman who is looking right in your soul, staring right at you. So there are some people that say, oh, you’re just repackaging this Orientalist stuff to make a buck. And she says no, I’m trying to use it to subvert it. But I think there are some people who will say that she’s just making pretty pictures, and making people feel comfy, seeing the harem all over again.

Suus: [00:20:16] That’s interesting—the performance can’t be too close to some presumed original or it becomes problematic and fraught. 

Ellen: [00:20:26] Or they don’t think it’s ironic or that it has to do with camp or irony around what’s straight and what’s not.

Suus: [00:20:38] Oh I think that’s really interesting: is the wifey an ironic wife?

Dustin: [00:20:43] What does it mean to try to subvert an original? What sort of problems do you get into when you do that? It’s always about the audience. Subversion is just difficult in general, because it’s so dependent on a sort of original document. 

Suus: [00:21:10] That arises especially once things start traveling, of course. If you do something, everyone in the audience knows the context and it’s situated. But if you become somebody like Kim Kardashian, it’s massive circulation either way, and you can’t control whether the audience will see irony or not. I can definitely say that for most of the women I study, there is very little irony going on. There’s a rather extreme earnestness, which is the other side of the coin—a particular gender performance where there can be no irony. It can’t come in because it would be dangerous.

Ellen: [00:21:58] Is there any humor? 

Suus: [00:22:04] Maybe I’m just not enlightened enough to grasp it. There’s lots of “the kids were being so funny,” but very little ironizing, where people say “I know what this looks like and I’m joking with you about it.” There’s almost none of that. Nah. They’ll sometimes say that they get approached in supermarkets for having many kids, and then they will take on the perspective of the audience—I know what this looks like to you. But it always pivots to actually, you are wrong for seeing this, for seeing something strange instead of seeing the way things should be. So even when that shift of perspective happens, it doesn’t actually. It can only strengthen the idea of being the true remnant, the last people still standing, holding on to what’s right. A lot of that type of language.

Ellen: [00:23:06] I’m so sorry I have to run to my student, because you’re helping me think! These different figures in the colonial context are appropriating what they are appropriating for a performance, riffing on this past in a way that is sometimes humorous or takes power. It has to do with this sense of “I’m me and not me at the same time.” And you can see both of those realities. Whereas these women say there’s one way that’s right and everything else is wrong, and I’m at war with the world. This is my worldview and everything has to be in it. Anything that’s not is a threat or bad or whatever. There can be no humor then. 

There’s another artist that I’m really interested in, a comedian called Gad Elmaleh. He has this stand-up called “The Other is Me,” and in part of it, he dresses as his own Moroccan grandma. He’s a Moroccan, Jewish, French Canadian comic. And he wears a headscarf and he’s shouting, he’s pretending to be his grandma. He wears fuzzy slippers, hairy legs, and an apron, yelling and jumping between French and Arabic. So, you know, he’s not really his grandma—he sort of is, but he also isn’t. By doing this at the same time, it’s funny. 

Achille Mbembe talks about humor as the way to get one up on power, to bust down power. If you can make fun of it, if you can twist it, if you can ironize it, you can master it a little bit. So there’s something about the presence and the absence of humor—I haven’t figured out what it is or what it means, but it seems to carry weight here. I’ll let you guys go. Thank you so much for organizing, I’m just under such a tsunami of stuff that it’s been bananas. 

Suus: [00:25:40] Honestly, I feel like we killed it, in a very short time frame.

Dustin: [00:25:46] I think so, too. We got everything in and it’s probably better that we were rushed, almost, because things are probably quite tight.

Suus: [00:25:56] Getting down to business!

This conversation relates to Ellen Amster’s study into "Lalla Essaydi," Dusty Gavin’s examination of KKKW Beauty's Fragrance Wifey, and Suzanne van Geuns’ research into biblical womanhood blogs.

An African ruler dressed in the finery of a cosmopolitan, fashionable man of the late seventeenth-century welcomes a Capuchin friar to his town.1  (PW092) A man and two attendants worship a live goat standing on a pedestal. (PW083) Eight carefully depicted birds occupy a spare landscape. (PW047) Early modern central Africa comes to life in the images that Capuchin friars—veterans of the Kongo and Angola missions—composed between 1650 and 1750 for the guidance of future missionaries. Their vivid full-page paintings, glossed with a few lines of text, present the intricacies of the natural, social, and religious landscape of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century west central Africa, a region in today’s western Democratic Republic of Congo and northern Angola (Fig. 1). In vignettes emulating the format of scientific illustrations, costume books, and even map cartouches, the friars depicted animals and plants, described central African cultural and religious practices, and detailed the primarily visual catechization methods they created for the parishes and new missions of a region whose inhabitants, at the time of the paintings, had already engaged of the paintings had engaged with the visual and material culture of Europe and Christianity for more than one hundred and fifty years.

• 1
  Research and writing for this Essay have been supported by a Berenson Fellowship from I Tatti – The Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, an American Academy Rome Prize, a Yale Institute for Sacred Music Fellowship, and a Paul Oskar Kristeller Fellowship from the Renaissance Society of America. Support for the digital format of the essay comes from the Yale Faculty of Arts and Sciences. I am grateful for the support and encouragement from the Virgili and Araldi families over the years in my study of the manuscripts in their collections. Gaston Javier Basile, Giacomo Berchi, Veronica Copello, Erin Griffin, Katharina Natalia Piechocki have helped me in small and big ways with the paleography and translation. Thank you to John Thornton for his positive review of the essay. David C. Recksieck and Jim DeGrand are to be credited for the line art and the map, respectively. Sophia Kitlinski, Nathalie Miraval, Bennett Harrison, and Vu Horwitz, offered key research assistance at different stages of the project. Ruby Anderson expertly and patiently took care of the digital upload and formatting of the essay. Still, all errors are mine. Finally my thanks to Emily Floyd for her unwavering support for the project and for her editorial engagement and guidance throughout the process.

Since the late fifteenth century, west central Africans, first the inhabitants of the kingdoms of Kongo, then those of Matamba, Ndongo, and people living under the purview of the Portuguese Conquista of Angola, participated in the commercial and diplomatic networks of the Atlantic World.2  Through trade, diplomatic gifts, and the travels of emissaries from and to the region, central Africans became familiar with, adopted, rejected, or adapted elements of the religious, political, visual, and material culture of Europe, the Americas, and Asia. Elite insignia and personal luxuries included imported fineries such as the showy beaver felt hat worn by the Ndembu ruler in PW092, or the colorful printed cottons draped around men and women of the Kongo and Angola as seen in PW007, PW070, PW098. 

When Capuchin friars arrived in the region in 1645 as part of a newly formed mission, they did not find themselves in the distant, foreign land wholly opposite to theirs that they expected to find. They landed instead in a cosmopolitan environment that deeply challenged their preconceptions about Africa and Africans. It was, in fact, the kings of Kongo themselves who had asked the Pope to send the Franciscan clerics, with the aim to ensure their realm’s independence in spiritual but also temporal affairs from the increasingly expansionist Portuguese colonial foothold of Angola, at its southern border. For historical reasons, Portugal claimed control over the Church of the Kongo through the rights of patronage.3  The African crown disagreed and turned directly to Rome to seek clerics outside of the Iberian realm’s control. The Capuchin central African mission emerged from these negotiations. Once in central Africa, the Capuchins not only worked at the demand of the local powers, but they also remained firmly under their control and dependent on their support in all aspects of their mission, from food and shelter to free passage and liturgical practice. 

This political context was unusual for an early modern European Catholic mission, which more often functioned within projects of colonial or imperial imposition than at the behest of local powers. This situation often created perplexing social interactions for the friars, in addition to the myriad, unexpected encounters, mediated or unmediated, that they faced with an endlessly surprising array of tropical flora and fauna. In response, they would turn to images to make sense of the wondrous novelties they encountered and the baffling situations they faced, as well as to document the responses they devised to them, in order to educate the friars who would follow them about the proper conduct of the mission in Kongo and Angola. The result of this decades-long reflection, operated collaboratively by a number of friars who often did not wish to be named, following the modesty of their vows, is a set of images that formed a coherent corpus from its first work created in the 1650s, to its last known manuscript penned around 1750. 

Today, this Capuchin central African corpus consists of four extant manuscripts connected by form and content. Chronologically, the first is a panel now in the Museo Francescano in Rome (MF00) dated to the 1650s. The second is a set of sixty-seven images that I call the Parma Watercolors likely created circa 1663-1690 (PW002 to PW102). Neither of these two manuscripts have identified authors. Decades later, around 1750, friar Bernardino d’Asti composed two versions of an illustrated manual he titled Missione in Prattica, one of which is today in the Biblioteca Civica di Torino, the other in the Vatican Library.4  The Turin library offers an online version of the manuscript.5  I made available for the first time the integrality of the images from the Vatican Library and the Parma Watercolors in my book Images on a Mission in Early Modern Kongo and Angola, published in 2022 with Penn State University Press.6

The present Essay complements the book, in conjunction with a Collection also in this issue of the MAVCOR Journal placing the images in their broader visual context and laying out points of comparisons between the different works.7  It offers additional visual material from the corpus by featuring details of each individual vignette of the 1650s poster as well as the unpublished versos of the Parma Watercolors that feature text. My 2007 photographs of the Museo Francescano drawing precede its latest conservation and retain parts of images and texts that have since been lost. My 2015 photographs of the Parma Watercolors also document the manuscript in a state of conservation that includes some edges and areas now eroded from the pages. 

Readers should turn to Images on a Mission for a discussion of the conception and execution of the Capuchin central African corpus, as well as for an analysis of their projects and of the stakes of their study. In the present essay, they will find my transcription and translation of the images’ text. I present this work not as a translator or a scholar of seventeenth-century Italian language, but as a specialist in the cross-cultural environment of early modern central Africa. Reading these documents in fact demands a particular set of skills that do not pertain wholly to language proficiency. Linguistically, they ebb and flow fluidly between Italian, Portuguese, Latin, Kikongo, and Kimbundu. Intellectually, they draw from and rely on ideas, practices, and political positions that are idiosyncratic to the Capuchin central African mission. Visually, they call upon genres, iconographies, and motifs rooted in early modern European visual culture, to depict objects, practices, and forms of knowledge with deep central African significance. Having researched, written about, and conceptualized the cross-cultural religious, visual, and political environment of central Africa in the early modern period for nearly two decades, with, what is more, special attention to the Capuchin presence and activities in the region, I am uniquely positioned to disentangle the difficulties presented by, and offer insight on, the texts and images. The number and complexity of both images and texts however greatly surpass anyone’s single abilities to make sense of them and note all their multifaceted connections. I have thus collaborated with MAVCOR Journal to include in this essay a comment section for each vignette where insights from readers about the texts and images will, over time, increase understanding of the corpus and its multifaceted contributions to knowledge. I hope that this space will allow for corrections to the transcriptions and translations, paleographic suggestions, object identifications, and complementary citations of primary or secondary sources, in a collaborative, cumulative, publicly available study of this material. 

• 2
  About the term “Conquista” to refer to Portuguese overseas colonial endeavors see Charles Ralph Boxer, Race relations in the Portuguese colonial empire, 1415-1825 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 2; Josiah Blackmore, Moorings: Portuguese expansion and the writing of Africa (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), xxii. For an overview of the history of the region see John K Thornton, A History of West Central Africa to 1850, vol. 14 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
• 3
  About the patronage rights see António da Silva Rego, Le patronage portugais de l'orient: aperçu historique (Lisbon: Agencia Geral do Ultramar, 1957); Isabel dos Guimarães Sá, "Ecclesiastical structures and religious action," in Portuguese Oceanic Expansion, 1400–1800, ed. Francisco Bethencourt and Diogo Ramada Curto (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
• 4
  Bernardino Ignazio da Vezza d'Asti, Missione in prattica. Padri Cappuccini ne' regni di Congo, Angola, et adiacenti., ca 1750, Biblioteca Civica Centrale di Torino, MS 457: 29, Turin; Bernardino Ignazio da Vezza d'Asti, Missione in prattica de RP cappuccini italiani ne regni di Congo, Angola, et adiacenti, ca. 1750, Biblioteca Vaticana, MS Borg. Lat. 316: Vatican Another, non illustrated version of is in Lisbon. Bernardino Ignazio da Vezza d'Asti and Guiseppe Rabagliati, Missione in Pratica de PP. Cappuccini Italiani ne Regni di Congo, Angola, e adiacenti brevemente esposta p: lume, e guida de Missionari a quelle Sante Missioni destinati, ca. 1750, Biblioteca Nacional de Lisboa, MS 1432 FG: Lisboa. About the story of these manuscripts see Cécile Fromont, Images on a Mission in Early Modern Kongo and Angola (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2022), 41-62.
• 5
  “Missione in Prattica,” Biblioteche Civiche Torinesi, accessed January 9, 2023, available here.
• 6
  Fromont, Images on a Mission.
• 7
  Cécile Fromont, "Depicting Kongo and Angola in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries," MAVCOR Journal 6, no. 1 (2022), available here.

 “Of the People, Victuals, Customs, Animals, and Fruits of the Kingdoms of Africa penetrated to preach the Gospel by order of the Sacred Congregation for Propaganda Fide by Capuchins in the year of 1644. Congo, Angola, Dongo or Njinga, and Embaca” labels the top of a large-format, ink on paper drawing measuring 73 by 40 cm, inventory number MF 1370 in the Museo Francescano of the Capuchin order’s Historical Institute at the Convent of San Lorenzo da Brindisi in Roma-Bravetta. Capuchin historian Édouard d’Alençon first reported the drawing’s purchase on the Roman antiquarian market around 1900 and its entrance into the collection of what was then the Missions Museum of the San Lorenzo da Brindisi Convent.1  No further mention of the piece exists to my knowledge, until 2011, when I first discussed it in print.9

The page, once folded, perhaps to travel from central Africa to Europe, presents on a single surface 35 individual vignettes of unequal size rendered in black ink to which short textual glosses were added subsequently. Stamped acanthus leaves frame the page with a border of a lighter hue than the drawings. The verso is blank. Images and texts work in concert to offer an ordered compendium of information about Kongo and Angola, from courtly life, to mores and customs, flora and fauna, and missionary prowess. Though not dated, it postdates the depicted violent death of Friar Joris van Gheel in 1652 and predates the death of Queen Njinga of Matamba in 1663, who it discusses as alive.10

A few notes on the following transcription and translation. To facilitate reading, I have labelled each vignette on the page individually with a number from 1 to 35. Each section includes my transcription of the Italian text with original orthography and punctuation, followed by my English translation which I kept purposely close to the source. Missing words or uncertain readings are indicated between brackets. Footnotes inserted in the Italian transcription give further information on particular terms.

• 1
  Edouard d'Alençon, "Essai de Bibliographie Capucino-Congolaise," Neerlandia Franciscana 1, no. 1 (1914): 261-62.
• 9
  Cécile Fromont, "Collecting and Translating Knowledge Across Cultures: Capuchin Missionary Images of Early modern Central Africa," in Collecting Across Cultures: Material Exchanges in the Early Modern Atlantic World, ed. Daniela Bleichmar and Peter Mancall (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).
• 10
  Hildebrandus ab Hooglede, “Le père Georges de Gheel (+1652): Missionnaire, philologue et martyr,“ Études Franciscaines 42, no. 238 (1930). See also biographical information in Graziano M. da Leguzzano Saccardo, Congo e Angola con la storia dell'Antica missione dei Cappuccini, 3 vols. (Venice-Mestre: Curia Povinciale dei Cappuccini, 1982-1983), 1:489-90.

The Parma Watercolors are a set of 67 watercolors on paper measuring 24 by 34 cm, once bound together as a codex as indicated by the stitch marks on their left edge. The general template of the pages consists of a main landscape-oriented image covering most of its surface accompanied by a short text at the bottom occasionally continuing into the verso of the page. A black box frames the designs. The numbering at the top of the watercolors runs from 2 to 104 with several gaps. It orders the vignettes thematically: colonial Angola (2, 7), aquatic animals (12 to 22), architecture (23 to 27), fruits and vegetables (29 to 36), trees (37 to 46), birds (47 to 53), land animals (56 to 68), mores and customs (70 to 81), superstitions and idolatry (83 to 89), missionary work (90 to 101), funerary practices (102, 104). Though unsigned and undated, their format and contents firmly place them within the Capuchin central African corpus of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, alongside the better known Missione in Prattica manuscripts and the explicitly labelled Museo Francescano drawing (MF00).1  Specific points of comparison include the juxtaposition of image and text, and the similarities in composition and subject matter. The depiction of a Mass performed in the outdoors in the Torino manuscript using a decorated portable altar echoes, for instance, that of a similar occasion in the Parma Watercolors (MIPT01 and PW098).

In addition, as many as 21 of the Parma Watercolors images closely match the designs of the prints that appeared in the most widely circulated publication to emerge from the Capuchin early modern mission to Kongo and Angola, friar Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi’s 1687 Istorica descrizione.2  The Parma text, in turn, which postdates the images, also shares key formulations and observations with this publication. The two works are closely related, but the nature of their relationship remains difficult to define. In the current state of knowledge about the two projects, it is best not to think of them as copy and prototype stricto sensu. Rather their connections are most productively considered as the reflection of their makers’ belonging in a common Capuchin visual and epistemic milieu within which images, writings, and information circulated fluidly both in central Africa and in Europe.3

The date of production of the vignettes’ images and later text is not elucidated beyond several anchor points. One is a terminus post quem for the images in the depiction of the capture of friars Buenaventura de Corella and Francisco de Veas by queen Njinga of Matamba in 1648, depicted on PW101. A timeframe for the texts, in turn, derives from the description on the same page of the current state of Christianity in Matamba as lapsing since the death of the queen, which occurred in 1663. The role the vignettes played directly or indirectly in the production of the prints in the Istorica descrizione in the 1670s further suggests that either they, or the template from which they and the prints both derive, already existed, and was made available to the printmaker.4  The fashions the two Portuguese elite men wear in vignette number 2 (PW002) fit with this timeline.5  They wear wigs of high, loose curls with a part in the middle, white cravats and lace cuffs, metallic trim on large-cuffed colorful coats, low-crown, upturned-brim hats meant to be carried rather than worn, walking sticks, and high-heeled boots that are in keeping with European aristocratic male fashion from the 1670s and 1680s. 

A few notes on the following translation. Each image, and its verso when including text, is followed by my transcription of the Italian text with original orthography and punctuation, and my English translation which I kept purposely close to the source. Missing words or uncertain readings are indicated between brackets. Footnotes inserted in the Italian transcription give information on particular terms. 

• 1
  See the Vatican and the Turin versions of the manuscripts, Bernardino da Vezza d’Asti, Missione in prattica (Turin); Bernardino da Vezza d’Asti, Missione in prattica (Vatican).
• 2
  Cavazzi and Alamandini, Istorica descrizione. For a full table of correspondence see Fromont, “Depicting Kongo and Angola,” available here.
• 3
  For a longer discussion of the corpus see Fromont, Images on a Mission, chapter 1 and 2.
• 4
  About the production history of the Istorica Descrizione prints see Fromont, Images on a Mission, chapter 1; Graciano Maria de Leguzzano and Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi, Descrição histórica dos três reinos do Congo, Matamba e Angola, Estudos de Cartografia Antiga. Série Memórias. Publicações 2-3, (Lisbon: Junta de Investigações do Ultramar, 1965), Introduction.
• 5
  Justine De Young, “1680-1689, 17th century, decade overview,” Fashion History Timeline, June 20, 2020, available here. Justine De Young, “1670-1679, 17th century, decade overview,” Fashion History Timeline, June 14, 2020, available here.

During the Aztec month and festival season of Huey Tozoztli, four local rulers departed the inner Basin of Mexico and began their annual pilgrimage to the top of Mount Tlaloc.1  Gathering at Tetzcoco, the tlahtoque—the Nahuatl term for rulers of city-states, here referring to the polities of Tenochtitlan, Tlacopan, Xochimilco, and Tetzcoco—departed to the east (Fig. 1). The trek undertaken by the allied sovereigns coincided with the height of the dry season. They ascended the treacherous mountain slope to petition for rain, part of a larger effort to initiate a renewal of nature for a successful upcoming agricultural season. This specific pilgrimage was enacted sometime in late April to early May, during the Late Postclassic period (1250 - 1519 CE), to fulfill a religious obligation and usher in a season of rebirth.2

• 1
  This essay was written during my time as the 2020-2022 Ittleson Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts. I thank the Center for their generous support. I also wish to thank Matthew H. Robb, Amara Solari, Kendyll Gross, Theresa A. Cunningham, and Donato Loia for their insightful feedback on earlier drafts of this project. I am indebted to Josefrayn Sánchez-Perry and Elliot Lopez-Finn for sharing their valuable insight on the religion of Postclassic Central Mexico. Elliot and Josefrayn workshopped several of these ideas with me and provided much feedback on earlier versions of this essay; I thank them for their generous comments, especially regarding the Nahuatl-language material. Megan McDonie and I have had many conversations about mountains over the years and I thank her for inspiring some of the ideas presented here and for directing my attention to a handful of the cited sources. Lastly, I warmly thank the article’s two anonymous reviewers as well as the Special Issue Editors for their thoughtful feedback. Any errors are my own.
• 2
  Richard F. Townsend, “The Renewal of Nature at the Temple of Tlaloc,” in The Ancient Americas: Art from Sacred Landscapes, ed. Richard F. Townsend (Chicago: The Art Institute, 1992), 173-174; Diego Durán, The Book of the Gods and the Rites of the Ancient Calendar, trans. and eds., Fernando Horcasitas and Doris Heyden (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971), 156-157. In this work, I take Townsend’s foundational understanding of “nature renewal” ceremonies and advance this interpretation, illuminating how the mountain slope was a crucial component of the pilgrimage and integral to this interpretation.

Most scholars considering the rituals at Mount Tlaloc have focused their interpretations to the mountain’s summit, assessing its physical placement in larger cosmological schema and reconstructing ceremonial experience from the archeological record. Writing in the late-twentieth century, Richard F. Townsend mainly emphasized the physical and metaphysical role of Mount Tlaloc’s peak in agricultural renewal ceremonies of the Postclassic period, primarily of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Townsend noted the special qualities of human experience in Mount Tlaloc, calling attention to the chilly winds that swirl around the mountain’s high altitude peak.1  In line with Townsend and building off of his work, I turn my attention to the mountain slope and the surface experience of this historic ritual ascension. Bridging ecology, ethnohistory, linguistics, and art historical inquiry, I argue that the various forms of vegetation encountered along the mountain slope by the tlahtoque during their ritual journey conveyed notions of agricultural fertility and were of ritual significance within Nahua worldview.2  In placing emphasis on this particular mountain slope, I contend that ritual ascension of the mountain was also of importance, preparing the rulers for veneration of Tlaloc atop the summit. The surface ecology of the slope, I suggest, corresponds to Tlalocan, an earthly paradise within Nahua worldview. The identification of landscapes, including that of Mount Tlaloc, as the manifestation of Tlalocan was primarily elucidated by Alfredo López Austin in the late-twentieth century.3  My interpretation of Mount Tlaloc builds upon this argument, relying upon López Austin’s foundational discussion of the earthly and mythical manifestations of Tlalocan.4  In the case of Mount Tlaloc, the ascension of the slope contributed to the experience of the overall pilgrimage undertaken by the tlahtoque as they sought to renew nature during the dry season. 

• 1
  Townsend, “The Renewal of Nature at the Temple of Tlaloc,” 173.
• 2
  In this piece, I utilize the term “Aztec” to refer to the individuals living in Postclassic central Mexico. Nahua references the speakers of Nahuatl and related languages of the region regardless of temporal frame. I also use the terms to correspond to Aztec state religion and Nahua ethnic religious expression. Additionally, while the evidence I utilize in this essay speaks to a specific elite, historical pilgrimage, Mount Tlaloc was a component of religious practice for other sects of society as well, see Garagarza, “The 1539 Trial of Don Carlos Ometochtli.”
• 3
  Alfredo López Austin, Tamoanchan, Tlalocan: Places of Mist, trans. Bernard R. Ortiz de Montellano and Thelma Ortiz de Montellano (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1997), 225. Likewise, my discussion about Mount Tlaloc and Tlalocan has benefited from an exchange with Elliot López-Finn and Julia Guernsey and the sharing of their forthcoming manuscript: Elliot López-Finn and Julia Guernsey, “Chalcatzingo and the Persistence of Sacred Space and Place,” in From Ch’een to Waka, eds. Jon Spenard and Jonathan Dubois (Forthcoming).
• 4
  López Austin, Tamoanchan, Tlalocan, 214-229. I also follow López Austin’s statement that various manifestations of these locales retained local meaning. Alfredo López Austin, The Myths of the Opossum: Pathways of Mesoamerican Mythology, trans. Bernard R. Ortiz de Montellano and Thelma Ortiz de Montellano (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993), 15.

After departing their respective cities, the tlahtoque began their pilgrimage to the summit of Mount Tlaloc.1 The group moved through the highland plateau to the eastern fringe of the valley. As the foursome walked accompanied by their retinues, the surrounding landscape slowly morphed from urban centers to villages to mountainous terrain. The local ecology, as well, noticeably shifted as the tlahtoque continued eastward. Mount Tlaloc, unlike the center of the valley, physically straddles two distinct ecological zones: subalpine forest and alpine meadow.2  The uninhabited and rural environment in which the mountain resides marked the location as ecologically distinct from the rest of the region.

A potential point of access to Mount Tlaloc’s slope was through the town of Coatlinchan. Early colonial pictorial evidence substantiates that it is the mountain’s western side that intersected with local footpaths. The Mapa de Coatlinchan (1579), initially created to aid in sixteenth-century land tenure disputes, indicates that access to Mount Tlaloc was achieved via the town of Coatlinchan.3  As illustrated in the map, various trails from Coatlinchan lead to and from the mountain’s slope, providing access to both the valley below as well as the summit. It is the mountain’s western slope that the artists of the Mapa de Coatlinchan depicted. Informed by his archaeological work and own ascent, Townsend suggested that the best path to the mountain slope was through the modern village of Tequexquinahuac, a municipality just north of Coatlinchan. Once in Tequexquinahuac, Towsend suggests that the four nobles continued “east by a dirt road winding up into the forested ravines of the rugged mountain massif.”4  Regardless of their exact point of interception, the tlahtoque began their ascent of Mount Tlaloc along its western slope. 

• 1
  Townsend, “The Renewal of Nature at the Temple of Tlaloc,” 173-174.
• 2
  Stainsław Iwaniszewski, “Archaeology and Archaeoastronomy of Mount Tlaloc, Mexico: A Reconsideration,” Latin American Antiquity 5, no. 2 (1994): 159-160.
• 3
  Ana Pulido Rull, Mapping Indigenous Land: Native Land Grants in Colonial New Spain (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2020), 119.
• 4
  Townsend, “The Mt. Tlaloc Project,” 27.

The very moment in which the tlahtoque reached the base of Mount Tlaloc is depicted in the Codex Borbonicus. Two illustrations from this sixteenth-century regional manuscript recalibrate the spatial focus of the pilgrimage by shifting attention to the mountain’s slope. The codex’s chapter describing the festivals of the Nahua twenty-day “veintenas,” or months, illustrates the Huey Tozoztli ceremony.1  Following the Indigenous cartographic convention of depicting multiple perspectives and views, pages 24 and 25 illustrate pilgrimages to and up Mount Tlaloc (Figs. 4 and 5).2  In both, and in other renderings of the mountain in the codex’s later illustrations, Mount Tlaloc is illustrated with a level summit, in washes of green, topped with a temple shrine housing its patron deity wielding a lightning bolt. The individual depicted is clearly identified as Tlaloc, as the deity is shown with his characteristic goggle eyes and fanged teeth. The spatial organization of the page encapsulates numerous moments in one. Without the viewer reorienting or moving the pages, the ritual specialists and attendants of the tlahtoque are depicted as processing horizontally across the plate. Page 24 depicts a child being presented to a ritual specialist, to be transported up the mountain as an offering to Tlaloc, while page 25 depicts the moment before the procession to the mountain’s summit, right as the human actors reach the mountain’s base. Baskets of food and ritual paraphernalia are depicted, indicating the ceremonies that would soon take place to inaugurate the rainy season. Mount Tlaloc is depicted on its side at a ninety-degree angle, but when the viewer rotates the plate ninety degrees, the figures are oriented as if ascending the mountain slope towards the summit shrine. 

• 1
  Intriguingly, most recorded festivals during the month of Huey Tozoztli are dedicated to the veneration of Chicomecoatl, the female deity of maize and sustenance, and are not mountain-centric ceremonies. It is possible, then, that the ceremonies on Mount Tlaloc are not the principal festival of Huey Tozoztli but a concurrent ritual act. Catherine R. DiCesare, “Tlaloc Rites and the Huey Tozotli Festival in the Mexican Codex Borbonicus,” Ethnohistory 62, no. 4 (2015): 693, 697.
• 2
  Josefrayn Sánchez-Perry first pointed out to me that whoever glossed the Codex Borbonicus with alphabetic text labels the figure on page 25 as “el gran díos y principal llamado tezcatepoca” (the great and principal god named Tezcatepoca). While Tezcatlipoca (modern orthography) was a prominent deity in the region, the individual depicted is surely Tlaloc based on his trademark attributes. Even though Tlaloc was known to inhabit numerous mountains in the region, plates 24 and 25 clearly depict the Huey Tozoztli ceremony to Mount Tlaloc, as corroborated by Durán. Josefrayn Sánchez-Perry, personal communication to author, 2021.

As illustrated in the Codex Borbonicus, the tlahtoque then commenced their climb of Mount Tlaloc (Fig. 6). This specific act of walking upwards and ascending a trail is identifiable in Nahuatl texts. Book 11 of the Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España, more popularly known as the Florentine Codex, captures individual experience and the components of physical movement as dictated by different types of trails and paths. Written between 1575 and 1577 by Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún alongside a cohort of native Nahuatl speakers, including Antonio Valeriano, Alonso Vegerano, Martín Jacobita, and Pedro de San Buenaventura, the codex is an important source for understanding Nahua culture.1  In Book 11, the definition for trail, or pitzactli, reveals the strenuous nature of walking upwards. The latter part of the definition translates as “it is ascending it is ascending in different places; it is ever meandering; it is choked with weeds, choked with trees, full of rocks.”2  As defined by Karttunen, the word pitzactli is derived from the adjective pitzāhuac, meaning “something thin, slender.”3  Kartunnen elaborates with an example, providing the context: “the road, the thin and subtle wind.”4  Pitzāhuac and its derivative pitzactli invoke the overgrown and uncultivated characterization of ascending mountain trails.

Surrounding the tlahtoque as they ascended the slope of Mount Tlaloc were unique ecological characteristics. In Nahua natural history and worldview, the mountain slope was a distinct geological domain: the upper slope contained its own soil chemistry and a discrete type of agricultural production. Book 11 of Florentine Codex, classifies more many varieties of soil that characterize the upper layer of the earth. In outlining the extensive and taxonomic Nahuatl nomenclature for describing the earth, the content of Book 11 meticulously distinguishes between color, fertility, location, moisture retention, and texture. 

Relevant within the context of mountain ecology writ large is the Nahuatl word tetlalli, a soil type found on mountains. Tetlalli describes the overall physical and visual properties of mountain terrain. Tetlalli encompasses dualities; the codex indicates that tetlalli ground can be rough but also agriculturally productive. The Florentine Codex states: 

It is land on the mountain—rocky, gravelly, loose-graveled. It is very rocky, gravelly, rough, dry, dry deep down; a productive place, the growing place of tecintli maize. It is dry deep down; it is dry. It hardens; it becomes wet; it produces.5

Corresponding to a broader Nahua attitude toward mountains, this definition encompasses the mountain surface as part of a greater agricultural cycle. Ground can be dry and unyielding. However, with the onset of rain, the soil can transform into the ideal surface environment for seeds to germinate. The duality of this description may also indicate a broader attitude toward mountains. Certainly, mountains were aquatic sources. They provided necessary sustenance to the valleys below. The authors of the Florentine Codex write that mountains were filled to the brim with water, comparable to ollas, or ceramic vessels.6  But mountains, especially those that could also be characterized as volcanos, were dangerous and part of the wilderness.7  Mountain soil was so physically and chemically separate from other locations in the valley that it required its own distinction as dictated by Nahua speakers.

• 1
  Kevin Terraciano, “Introduction” in The Florentine Codex: An Encyclopedia of the Nahua World in Sixteenth-Century Mexico, eds. Jeanette Favrot Peterson and Kevin Terraciano,  (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2019), 13.
• 2
  Sahagún, Florentine Codex, Book 11, Chapter 12, 267. I utilize the translation provided by Arthur J. O Anderson and Charles Dibble. At times, and within the essay’s prose, I opine on the translation and meanings as informed by Nahuatl analytical dictionaries and contemporary grammatical understandings of the language.
• 3
  Frances Karttunen, An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 197.
• 4
  Ibid.
• 5
  Sahagún, Florentine Codex, Book 11, Chapter 12, 253.
• 6
  Ibid., 247.
• 7
  Mountains also occupied the urban outskirts and represented densely forested space; wilderness abounded within this terrain. Frances Kartunnen translates cuauhtlah as “mountain, wilderness, forest,” combining the landform with its ecological properties and characteristics. Karttunen, An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl, 64.

While in the Codex Borbonicus Mount Tlaloc was rendered in line with the Nahua visual convention of depicting a green mountain glyph, other evidence refers to the botanical qualities of the mountain slope. Scholars have long identified Mount Tlaloc, and the neighboring landscape, as a microcosm of Tlalocan.1  Some analyses have interpreted the actual mountain as a “point of access” to Tlalocan.2  Tlalocan was chiefly accessed through supernatural apertures as the mythical locale was understood to reside within the earth. Scholars have yet to connect the local ecology to Tlalocan, enriching the ethnohistoric record that recounts the pilgrimage undertaken by the tlahtoque to the mountain’s peak. The Florentine Codex offers insight into how Nahuas conceived of Tlalocan. In Book 6, devoted to Rhetoric and Moral Philosophy, the authors write that Tlalocan was an “earthly paradise,” ruled by Tlaloc.3  They explain:

And then those who have been drowned, those struck by lightning: the old men went saying that they who are good of heart are struck by lightning because the Tlaloque desire them; they long for them. They take them there to their home, Tlalocan. They live by the master, Xoxouhqui, he who is provided with rubber, with incense, Tlamacazqui, lord of Tlalocan. For verily in Tlalocan those who enter, those taken, those struck are submerged there. They live in eternal spring; never is there withering; forever there is sprouting, there is verdure; it is eternally green.4

Tlalocan was an un-earthly domain that was forever sprouting. This mythic, misty locale was ruled by Tlaloc and the Tlaloque (not to be confused with tlahtoque). The Tlaloque, named in the above passage as Xoxouhqui and Tlamacazqui, are chief deities associated with Tlalocan and attendants of Tlaloc. While Tlalocan was Tlaloc’s plane of existence, other deities simultaneously and similarly controlled the un-earthly paradise. 

In naming human sacrifice and offerings, the description of Tlalocan links itself to known rituals associated with Mount Tlaloc. The ethnohistoric account of sixteenth-century chronicler Juan Bautista Pomar (ca. 1535 – 1601) complements the Florentine Codex’s description. In his recording of the rituals that took place on Mount Tlaloc’s summit, Pomar describes a white human-shaped stone statue of Tlaloc. Carved out of the spherical shape of the figure’s head was a vessel where white, black, red, and yellow kernels of corn were deposited.5  Into this receptacle, white, black, red, and yellow kernels of corn were also deposited.6  Pomar further elaborates on the offering of children to Tlaloc, stating that after their ritual purpose had been served and their sacrifice complete, they were given to the mountain via a natural cavern at the summit.7  This act was viewed as regenerative, as the bodies of the children were transformed into maize kernels, ensuring the fruitful harvest during the next rainy season.8  Here, this exchange consists of ritual offerings for upcoming rain to fertilize the local soils.

Within Nahua worldview, Tlalocan was not only an un-earthly domain but it was also the repository for human offerings. Those who had been killed by lightning were taken “home” to Tlalocan because Tlaloc longed for them to be within his territory.46  In Tlalocan there is only one type of climate: misty and perpetually rainy.47  In this paradise that characterized Tlaloc’s realm the environment was overflowing with abundance. Maize, gourds, squash blossoms, amaranth, tomatoes, and green beans abounded.48  Mount Tlaloc was the ideal, ever-verdant location from which to successfully petition for rain to effect agricultural renewal.

López Austin suggests Tlalocan was “replicated” within the mountain range and that Tlalocan was a distinct sacred geographical zone.49  Additionally, mountains were more than a simple reflection of this perpetually fertile locale. Mount Tlaloc manifested the agricultural and ecological properties of Tlalocan. Properties, or components, of the natural world were integrated into the larger Nahua cosmovision. Otherworldly and un-earthly locales and domains were not cleanly separated from the terrestrial plane of the known earth. Molly Bassett eloquently teases out the nuances of this larger worldview, especially as cosmovision relates to elements of the natural world. In her weaving of the sacred and the quotidian components of Aztec and Nahua life and experience, Bassett concludes that there are few concrete distinctions. She writes that Aztec religion acknowledged many “animate entities” including parts of the natural world.50  This specific cosmovision “wove the this-worldly and the otherworldly into the tangible and observable environment.”51  The Nahua understood the otherworldly and the earthly to be intertwined. For the Postclassic peoples of Central Mexico, there was no physical distinction between supernatural and natural. Rather the lived world was a complex web that seamlessly wove together physical experience and greater divine understandings. In this way, the surface ecology of Mount Tlaloc’s slope experienced by the tlahtoque was of this earthly domain but also encompassed connotations to the otherworldly lush vegetation of Tlalocan, aiding in the tlahtoque’s pilgrimage. 

Durán establishes the relationship between trees, Tlaloc, and Tlalocan. The forest that Tlaloc ruled over could be replicated in urban spaces, acting as a manifestation of Tlalocan.52  While the fir forest that characterizes the mountain’s mid-slope was an ecological indication that the tlahtoque had reached a certain altitude, and completed a certain leg of their pilgrimage, it was also a tree species that was ritually prominent in venerations of Tlaloc. In the Primeros Memoriales, a sixteenth-century Nahuatl text compiled by Sahagún and a Nahua cohort, fir trees and their branches are synonymous with venerations of Tlaloc and the replication of Tlalocan.53

• 1
  López Austin, Tlalocan y Tamoanchan, 51, 227-228. Osvaldo Roberto Murillo, “Antecedentes históricos y arqueológicos del Monte Tláloc,” in Páginas en la nieve: Estudios sobre la montaña en México, eds. Margarita Loera Chávez y Peniche, Stanislaw Iwaniszewski, and Ricardo Cabrera (Mexico City: INAH-ENAH/CNCA, 2007), 60, 62, 69, 72.
• 2
  Phillip P. Arnold, Eating Landscape: Aztec and European Occupation of Tlalocan (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1999), 87.
• 3
  Sahagún, Florentine Codex, Book 6, Chapter 8, 35.
• 4
  Ibid., Book 6, Chapter 21, 114.
• 5
  Juan Bautista Pomar, Relación de Texcoco, in Nueva Colección de Documentos para la Historia de México: Relaciones de Texcoco y de la Nueva España, eds. Joaquín García Icazbalceta and Alonso de Zurita (México, D.C.: Editorial Salvador Chávez Hayhoe, 1941), 14.
• 6
  Pomar, Relación de Texcoco, 18; Johanna Broda, “Ritos mexicas en los cerros de la cuenca: Los sacrificios de niños,” in La Montaña en el Paisaje Ritual, ed. Johanna Broda, Stainsław Iwaniszewski, and Ismael Arturo Montero García (México: Conaculta e INAH, 2001), 299.
• 7
  Ibid., 18; Johanna Broda, “Ritos mexicas en los cerros de la cuenca: Los sacrificios de niños,” in La Montaña en el Paisaje Ritual, ed. Johanna Broda, Stainsław Iwaniszewski, and Ismael Arturo Montero García (México: Conaculta e INAH, 2001), 299; also discussed in Joyce Marcus, “Rethinking Ritual,” in The Archaeology of Ritual, ed. Evangelos Kyriakidis (Los Angeles: Costen Institute of Archaeology, University of California, 2007), 52-53.
• 8
  Broda, “Ritos mexicas en los cerros de la cuenca,” 299.
• 46
  Sahagún, Florentine Codex, Book 6, Chapter 8, 35.
• 47
  López Austin, Tlalocan y Tamoanchan, 216.
• 48
  Sahagún, Florentine Codex, Book 3, Chapter 2 Appendix, 45.
• 49
  López Austin, Tamoanchan, Tlalocan, 227-228.
• 50
  Bassett, The Fate of Earthly Things, 196.
• 51
  Ibid.
• 52
  While the tlahtoque undertook their pilgrimage to Mount Tlaloc, ritual activity was underway within the ceremonial precinct of Tenochtitlan. In the plaza opposite the shrine to Tlaloc that was part of the twin-temple construction of the Templo Mayor, the Aztec’s main temple, a miniature forest landscape was created within the massive urban center. The plaza was adorned with trees, bushes, and rocks to emulate the surrounding world and connect the ceremonial precinct to the rainmaking rites undertaken by the ruler. In the center a large tree was erected and connected to four smaller trees via ropes. Durán, The Book of the Gods, 163; López Austin, Tamoanchan, Tlalocan, 223.
• 53
  While this text was recorded and compiled in the sixteenth century, the Song of Tlaloc hosts numerous pre-Hispanic associations.

The fir trees encountered along Mount Tlaloc’s slope by the tlahtoque were characteristically distinguished within the Central Mexican high-altitude landscape and within Nahua natural history (Fig. 9).1  In Book 11 of the Florentine Codex, the authors classify numerous tree species. Fir trees (oiametl) are “slender, straight” and “like turquoise” while pine trees (ocotl) are “verdant, very verdant” and “a provider of light, a means of seeing, a resinous torch.”2  The caption for the Florentine Codex’s description of fir trees labels the trees as “very precious, very medicinal,” indicating their revered properties in Nahua natural history. Through associations between fir forests and the color turquoise, the authors of the Florentine Codex link the tree species to the deity of rain.

As the nobility ascended the mountain they moved physically and ceremonially through the fir forest to their mountaintop veneration.3  The correlation of Tlalocan and “house[s] of fir” in the Tlalloc ycuje suggests the ruler’s movement up the mountain slope was akin to moving through a region that had ecological associations to Tlalocan. Certainly, and at minimum, the trees were acknowledged for their ceremonial role and the importance of their branches during other rituals. But the physicality of the forest likely figured into the sensorial experience imparted on those moving through the area. Bassett notes that modern speakers of Nahuatl understand plant growth, and physical changes, as a sign of animacy.4  In Mesoamerican visual culture and worldview, the environment was a model with which to clarify and shape the immediate world. The symbolism of the surrounding flora was a profound way in which Nahua peoples experienced and organized the sacred spaces of their world.5  As distilled by López Austin, spaces could manifest as a Tlalocan through ritual activity.  In our case, this manifested by the tlahtoque’s peregrination of Mount Tlaloc’s slope.6  Spaces occupied by humans could function as and relate to Tlalocan (the nearby constructed Aztec botanical space of Tetzcotzingo serves as a neighboring example of this earthly manifestation).7  The ecological components of Mount Tlaloc’s slope were simultaneously both real and mythical landscape. 

Additionally, the fir trees encountered by the tlahtoque upon the mountain slope created a distinct microclimate. The altitudinal gradient of the mountain’s western slope angles the vegetation away from harsh winds and damaging UV radiation, protecting the trees from the meteorological elements.8  This ecological characterization, among other associations, echoed the eternal verdant lushness associated with Tlalocan. It is possible that the ecology of this specific slope was one of the factors that lead to the mountain’s characterization as Tlaloc’s dwelling place. The botanical weaving of Tlalocan and Mount Tlaloc meant that those ascending the mountain experienced the mythical Tlalocan through an identifiable and proximate space.

• 1
  Figure 9 (as well as Figure 6) are contemporary photographs of Mount Tlaloc. In utilizing these images to illustrate this essay’s argument, I acknowledge the disjunction between the depicted forested terrain versus ancient forests of the past. The ancient forests of Mount Tlaloc were likely cut down during massive deforestation efforts of the sixteenth century. I use these photographs cautiously balancing them against primary Indigenous sources.
• 2
  Ibid., Book 11, Chapter 6, 107-108.
• 3
  As recorded in the early colonial documentary record, fir branches were a component of physical offerings in a Catholic context. Translated by Frances Karttunen, the Nahuatl noun acxoyatl is understood as the fir branches used specifically in penitential offerings. In Book 8 of the Florentine Codex 8, devoted to kings and lords, the authors state “They constrained him to do the penances, setting fir branches [on the city altars] at night, or there where they went to place the fir branches on mountain tops—there were sacrifices were made at midnight.” While this specific ritual does not directly correlate to ceremonies at Mount Tlaloc, the relationship of fir branches to mountaintop ceremonies is of note. Karttunen, An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl, 3; Sahagún, Primeros Memoriales, 74, 126; Sahagún, Florentine Codex, Book 8, Chapter 20, 72.
• 4
  Bassett, The Fate of Earthly Things, 11-14.
• 5
  Jeanette Favrot Peterson, “Flora and Fauna as Metaphor in Precolumbian Mesoamerica,” in Precolumbian Flora and Fauna: Continuity of Plans and Animal Themes in Mesoamerican Art (San Diego: Mingei International Museum, 1990), 10.
• 6
  López Austin, Tamoanchan, Tlalocan, 227-228.
• 7
  Paul Avilés, “Seven Ways of Looking at a Mountain: Tetzcotzingo and the Aztec Garden Tradition,” Landscape Journal 25, no. 2 (2006): 143-157.
• 8
  Jimenez-Noriega, et al., “Anatomical Variation of Five Plant Species,” 2194, citing Juan A. Encina-Dominquez, Francisco J. Encina-Dominguez, Efrén Mata-Rocha, and Jesús Valdes- Reyna, “Aspectos Estructurales, Composición Florística y Caracterización Ecológica del Bosque de Oyamel de la Sierra de Zapalinamé, Coahuila, México,” Boletín de la Sociedad Botánica de México 83 (2008): 13-24.

Once the tlahtoque moved through the fir tree region of Mount Tlaloc’s slope the foursome next encountered pine trees. Recall that scientific surveys place pine forest at 3,815 meters, after the zone of fir trees. Pine forest, much like fir but a distinct type of tree, had distinct ritual connotations.1  Pine resin certainly had practical uses, it could be made into rubber or chewing gum, but it was also revered as a religious offering and valued for its medicinal use.2  The entry for pine in the Florentine Codex places emphasis on the usage of the wood as a catalyst for vision. It reads, “[t]he pine is embracing. It is a provider of light, a means of seeing, a resinous torch.”3  Pine wood was used for torches and the resin as fuel for the flame, especially during pre-contact ceremonial feasts.4  Durán noted that “even the bark of resinous trees was revered so that it could create a good fire,” indicating that resinous trees, like pine, were crucial to effective ceremonies.5  In conjunction, this upper piedmont area is an ideal habitat for whitetail deer, a common food source in the region.6  Pine forest fostered a “precocious habitat for white-tailed deer” and represented the fertile and life-giving environment that Tlaloc was capable of providing.7  The ecology of the upper slope of Mount Tlaloc right before the timberline is replete with agricultural and ritual significance. 

After moving through the pine forest, the tlahtoque’s path to the summit becomes increasingly difficult to navigate as the mountain surface turns jagged due to ancient lava flow.8  Townsend suggests that the tlahtoque climbed the mountain guided by a fifteenth-century aqueduct, after moving through the highly forested area of the mountain’s slope.9  Considering that this aqueduct provided water to the eastern valley of Mexico, Townsend argues that the ritual climb to the summit of Mount Tlaloc ensured essential water was continuously provided to the valley below, thus marking the kings who conducted this ritual as life giving themselves.10

Although Nahua artists rendered the mountains of this region with their icy snow-capped peaks, the physical perception of temperature along Mount Tlaloc’s slope likely differed from our twenty-first century physical understanding.11  Tlalocan, as an eternal springtime and fertile environment, projected warmth, even when meteorological conditions indicated otherwise. Within Nahua worldview, the entirety of the earth’s surface encompassed a radiating, warm energy.12  This energy, or tonalli, is best understood as an animating quality garnered from the sun’s rays.13  Tonalli could also relate to the seasons; its warming quality specifically aligned with the temperate climate of late spring and summer.14  Plants could absorb and capture tonalli.15  Tlalocan was a warm spring where plants possessed the heat-like quality of tonalli. 

• 1
  While fir and pine trees are both classified as conifers and belong to the same plant family, their plant group names are different. Fir trees are categorized as Abies while pine trees are members of the genus Pinus.
• 2
  James Maffie, Aztec Philosophy: Understanding a World in Motion (Louisville: University Press of Colorado, 2014), 187.
• 3
  Sahagún, Florentine Codex, Book 11, Chapter 6, 107-108.
• 4
  Pine torches are illustrated in Primeros Memoriales fol. 252v, Codex Telleriano- Remensis fol. 29r, and the Codex Vaticanus A fol. 84v.
• 5
  Durán, Ancient Gods and Rites, 290.
• 6
  William T. Sanders, Jeffrey R. Parsons, and Robert S. Santley, The Basin of Mexico: Ecological Processes in the Evolution of a Civilization (New York: Academic Press, 1979), 88, 282, 476, 479.
• 7
  Ibid., 479.
• 8
  Townsend, “The Mt. Tlaloc Project,” 27.
• 9
  Townsend, “The Renewal of Nature at the Temple of Tlaloc,” 173.
• 10
  Ibid., 182.
• 11
  The Codex Nuttall notably features mountains with their snow-capped peaks, including that of Mount Tlaloc. Ferdinand Anders, Maarten Jansen, and Gabina Aurora Pérez Jiménez, El rey 8 Venado, Garra de Jaguar, y la dinastía de Teozacualco-Zaachila: Libro explicativo del llamado Códice Zouche-Nuttall(Madrid: Sociedad Estatal Quinto Centenario, 1992), 114-115.
• 12
  Maffie, Aztec Philosophy, 271.
• 13
  Karttunen, An Analytical Dictionary of Nahuatl, 245-246.
• 14
  Sahagún, Primeros Memoriales, 224, note 13.
• 15
  Maffie, Aztec Philosophy, 272. Allison Caplan has explored the relationship between tonalli and Nahua featherwork. Allison Caplan, “The Living Feather: Tonalli in Nahua Feather Production,” Ethnohistory 67, no. 3 (2020): 383-406.

Once at the top the rulers processed around the enclosed courtyard at the summit (Fig. 10).1  Surrounding the effigy of Tlaloc were smaller effigy figures, likely representations of the Tlaloque. Together, the figures replicated the deities of Tlaloc’s domain.2  Townsend describes how, one by one, and in order of rank, the kings presented elaborate gifts—textiles, headdresses composed of fine feathers, jewelry made of precious stones—to Tlaloc and the smaller figures.3  Sumptuous feasts then commenced and the blood of sacrificed children was sprinkled upon the worshipped figures.4  After the offerings on the mountaintop had concluded, the tlahtoque then descended the mountain in celebration.5  In his work on the archaeology of Mount Tlaloc’s summit, Townsend unites Durán’s account with the archaeological record. The summit of Mount Tlaloc was outfitted with a prominent ritual stage; Durán writes of a “large, square courtyard, surrounded by a well-built fence” that was  “whitewashed”  and “could be seen from many leagues away.”6  This construction in concert with the performed ritual labor created an opening to the “womb of the mountain” below.7  Townsend proposes, in connecting the ethnohistoric accounts to the archaeological record, that the offerings of blood at the mountaintop enclosure were akin to a ritualized fertilization within the womb shape resting on top of the mountain.8  The historic rituals of the mountain summit, as distilled by ethnohistoric and archaeological sources, were made possible only after the tlahtoque physically ascended the mountain slope. 

• 1
  Archaeological evidence corroborates much of Durán’s accounts. However, the material record also illuminates additional aspects of this pilgrimage and ceremony. As suggested by Johanna Broda, the 125-meter processional causeway, attached to the courtyard, was oriented to the east so that those journeying to the shrine were also simultaneously processing towards the sunrise. Anthony F. Aveni, Edward E. Calnek, and Horst Hartung proposed that Tenochtitlan’s Templo Mayor was oriented to align with the eastern summit of Mount Tlaloc. Similarly, Stainsław Iwaniszewski exposed the numerous astronomically aligned sightlines of Mount Tlaloc to the neighboring landforms of Malinche and Pico de Orizaba. Johanna Broda, “Processions and Aztec State Rituals in the Landscape of the Valley of Mexico,” in Processions in the Ancient Americas, ed. Susan Toby Evans (University Park: Penn State University Occasional Papers in Anthropology no. 33, 2016), 189; Anthony F. Aveni, Edward E. Calnek, and Horst Hartung, “Myth, Environment, and the Orientation of the Templo Mayor of Tenochtitlan,” American Antiquity 53 (1988): 287-309; Iwaniszewski, “Archaeology and Archaeoastronomy of Mount Tlaloc, Mexico,” 158-176.
• 2
  Durán also reported that around the center sculpture of Tlaloc were smaller figures, thought to represent the neighboring mountains. These smaller figures “accompanied Tlaloc, as the other hills accompanied the mountains.” These miniature mountains relate to a similar practice detailed in the Florentine Codex, in which figurines of mountains were molded from amaranth seed dough and represented the landforms of the valley of Mexico, including that of Mount Tlaloc. It is more than likely that the figures represented both adjacent mountains as well as the tlaloque. Durán, Historia de las Indias de Nueva España, 82, my translation.
• 3
  Durán, The Book of the Gods, 156; Townsend, “The Renewal of Nature at the Temple of Tlaloc,” 176-178.
• 4
  Durán, The Book of the Gods, 157-58.
• 5
  Ibid., 160.
• 6
  Durán, Historia de las Indias de Nueva España, 82, my translation.
• 7
  Townsend connects this constructed courtyard as an opening to the mountain’s cave/womb relying upon an illustration from the Codex Borbonicus as evidence. In this illustration, the creator gods are sitting within a rectangular enclosure as water flows from the courtyard enclosure’s opening. Townsend, “The Renewal of Nature at the Temple of Tlaloc,” 179.
• 8
  Ibid., 182.

Within the context of Late Postclassic Central Mexico a ritual of high-altitude pilgrimage was undertaken by four rulers. Not only did this pilgrimage inaugurate the rainy season, it also corresponded to the pan-Mesoamerican concept that pilgrimage and concurrent ritual acts were part of a larger effort to maintain balance and continuity within the world.1  In their trek horizontally across the Basin of Mexico and then vertically up the slope of Mount Tlaloc, the tlahtoque were actively involved in veneration of the rain deity even before reaching the mountain’s summit. A reevaluation of this ritual indicates that the ascension of the mountain slope was itself important for local rulers. The ecological context of Mount Tlaloc’s slope was grafted onto the physical experience of pilgrimage, contributing to an all-encompassing journey of renewal. The mountain slope possessed the physical and ecological capacity to render it as a localized Tlalocan, made manifest by the rulers’ interaction with and understanding of the space as they moved through it. Ascension through this earthly paradise further enhanced the rain renewal ceremonies that would continue on the mountain’s summit. This distinct ecological discourse shifts our perception of the mountain’s overall physical role in rain renewal ceremonies. A consideration of the mountain slope highlights how the totality of its steep sides and exposed bedrock contributed to pilgrimage experiences. Even today, the legacy of Postclassic and Late Postclassic conceptions of Mount Tlaloc resonate as it is still venerated as a sacred location. Numerous pilgrims continue to ascend the slope to worship on its peak.2

• 1
  For a discussion on pan-Mesoamerican ritual, see Jeremy D. Coltman and John M.D. Pohl, ed., Sorcery in Mesoamerica (Louisville: University Press of Colorado, 2020). For a Maya comparison, see Joel Palka, Maya Pilgrimage to Ritual Landscapes: Insights from Archaeology, History, and Ethnography (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2014).
• 2
  Iwaniszewski, “Archaeology and Archaeoastronomy of Mount Tlaloc, Mexico,” 162. Iwaniszewski writes of a “modern shrine” and “six wooden crosses inserted into a wall,” indicating the presence of modern ceremonies. While Iwaniszewski’s report is from 1994, the mountain peak is still thought of as a revered location in the twenty-first century.

There is a long history to this special issue of MAVCOR Journal on Material Islam. In 2013 a session called “The Matter of Islam” was held at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion. Following this, conversations with several scholars interested in questions of material religion and Islam coalesced and in 2014 we started a five-year seminar at annual conferences of the AAR focusing on Material Islam. Intentionally interdisciplinary, we brought art historians, anthropologists, and historians together with religious studies scholars, while also seeking out conversations between Islamicists and those working in other religious contexts. Several of the pieces included here came out of these meetings: Ali Karjoo-Ravary’s essay on a  fourteenth-century chronicle of the ruler Burhan al-Dīn, Nathan Hofer’s study of Sufi self-isolation practices (khalwa) in medieval Egypt, Anna Bigelow’s exploration of embodiment and materiality in contemporary India, Karen Ruffle’s look at the standards carried in Shi'i commemorations of the martyrdom of Husayn, and Jonathan Brockopp’s piece on the materiality of a tenth-century Tunisian manuscript. The work of a few other seminar participants were included in a volume edited by Anna Bigelow, Islam through Objects (Bloomsbury 2021), including D. Fairchild Ruggles, Christiane Gruber, and Richard McGregor.1  Yet others have appeared elsewhere in print, including work by Asma Hilali, Charles Hirschkind, Irfana Hashmi, and Kambiz GhaneaBassiri.2  Over five years, our conversations focused on devotional objects, the Islamic sensorium, the book as a material object, the Muslim body, and the various roles of the mosque as a social, political, and spiritual space. Taken together, these varied essays demonstrate an incredibly wide-ranging, rich, and exciting arena of study.

At the outset of these collaborations, few works existed to establish material Islam as a dynamic subfield. Most publications on material religion focused on Christianity (McDannell, Morgan) or were more disciplinarily singular in orientation (Blair & Bloom).3  Scholarship that did address larger questions of Islamic approaches to materiality still needed to do the important work of unsettling tired tropes of Islamic iconoclasm or iconophobia (Elias, Gruber).4  Writing these prefatory comments in 2022, it is encouraging to see how many excellent studies have emerged in this diverse and exciting field. Leor Halevi’s Modern Things on Trial: Islam’s Global and Material Reformation in the age of Rida, 1865-1935 (Columbia, 2019), Michael Muhammad Knight’s Muhammad’s Body: Baraka Networks and the Prophetic Assemblage (UNC 2020), and Richard McGregor’s Islam and the Devotional Object: Seeing Religion in Egypt and Syria (Cambridge, 2020) are all excellent examples of the theoretical and methodological depth now becoming available.5  Attention to historical context, engagement with theoretical models from within Muslim scholarly traditions, and sustained attention to things that are often marginalized or merely mentioned combine to make the study of material Islam among the most compelling arenas of study today. 

When the opportunity to publish some of the papers from the Material Islam Seminar in MAVCOR Journal was presented to us, we leaped at it. In this rigorously peer-reviewed and beautifully curated online journal, we found a partner similarly interested in innovating to push the boundaries of the study of religion and to break down the walls that continue to silo the study of non-Christian religions in the academy. The born-digital format of the journal has allowed contributors to include as many images as their argument or subject matter requires. In Ayodeji Ogunnaike’s article on “The Transcontinental Genealogy of the Afro-Brazilian Mosque,” the images in and of themselves make a significant part of the author’s argument. In the case of Anna Bigelow’s essay, we were able to include videos of the ceremonies discussed by the author. While in Nathan Hofer’s study, images take a backseat to the written record of the khalwa as a profoundly material social phenomenon. 

Rather than settling on a single style of transliteration for languages written in the Arabic script, we were able to work with the staff of MAVCOR to innovate a means by which key words, such as names and important concepts, can appear in the Latin script as they are pronounced in the local language in which the authors conducted their research while their original script becomes visible to readers when they hover their cursors over the key name or term. This allows readers to see both how a word is written and how it is pronounced in a lived context. This technical solution to a longstanding problem of transliteration and the use of Arabic script across multiple languages in Islamic Studies. It has the added benefit of allowing key terms and names to become discoverable in search engines when sought in their original script. 

While the dynamism of this field and possibilities of publishing in a born-digital medium are invigorating, significant challenges remain. We encountered some of these challenges already during the Material Islam Seminar. After the enthusiastic reception we received during “The Matter of Islam” panel, which was attended by over 70 people, we expected a small group of scholars to follow the seminar annually. To allow this group to engage more deeply with the papers of the seminar, we distributed them to members of the AAR ahead of the conference. But the core group we anticipated never formed. Each seminar was well attended, but different topics attracted different scholars. Our hope that the value of a discussion across varying forms of materialization and embodiment of Islamic beliefs and practices would find a sustained audience from year to year did not transpire. For example, our session on the book as a material object attracted several qur’anic studies scholars because of the papers on the Muṣḥaf (qur’anic codex). The conversations between art historians and textual scholars during the seminar were mutually informative, but they were not grounded enough in any unifying theoretical or methodological framework for them to take root and continue beyond that specific seminar. Moreover, there seemed to be a sense of competition about what really matters in Islamic Studies. This sense of competition was also palpable during the seminar on devotional objects, where we discussed whether theological and legal discourses on images and bodies should have a place in the material study of Islam. This debate inspired GhaneaBassiri’s article on wuḍu’ socks in this journal. During our seminar on the sensorium, when someone asked what the value is of studying materiality as a discreet category if everything in religions, if not in life, is embodied, their question was not taken as a productive query. In this issue, Hofer questions whether “material religion” is surreptitiously reviving religion as a stable, delimiting category. This is a genuine question. It is our hope that as the material study of Islam strives to find a place in the academy, it does not foreclose critique.  

Even as the study of material religion claims to break with Protestant-centered understandings that religions are ultimately about belief, the field remains heavily Christocentric. The MAVCOR site itself is predominantly populated by articles and conversations about images familiar to Christians and scholars of Christianity in Europe and the Americas. In fact, only a handful of essays or interviews concerning Islam have appeared in the journal since its inception in 2014. (Xavier, Moallem, Makar) We also found the peer review process challenging. The careful philological training associated with traditional Islamic Studies and advances made in recent decades in the study of material culture were not natural conversation partners. Peer reviewers sometimes failed to see the contribution of some of these works. At other times they made demands for the study of religious spaces, buildings, and objects that are simply not possible through material of Islamic provenance. Conversely, some Islamic Studies scholars trained philologically did not immediately see the payoff in careful analysis of objects and images, which they took to speak for themselves. 

By identifying the complexities of the Material Islam Seminar and the production of this special issue of MAVCOR Journal, we do not mean to cast a shadow on the field. On the contrary, we see these as welcome intellectual challenges rather than obstacles. They point to the dynamism of the field rather than its limitations. As Christiane Gruber points out in the interview we conducted with her for this issue, the material study of Islam is branching out in multiple directions that are “productively co-constitutive.” Focusing on the materiality of religion has meant that cultural studies scholars may need to collaborate with lab scientists to better understand the materiality of the objects they study or archaeologists might collaborate with media studies scholars to better understand the circulation of the object they study. The lack of cohering methodologies and theoretical framings is a product of these new collaborations, and could provide exciting opportunities, if allowed to take its course rather than be stifled by concerns about disciplinary boundaries.

As editors of this special issue, we addressed the above-mentioned challenges by drawing on what we learned from the multidisciplinary and inter-religious discussions in the Material Islam Seminar, to translate what is of value in Islamic Studies to scholars of materiality and vice versa. We were fortunate to work with patient authors. The journal, and our editor Emily Floyd in particular, were trusting, yet meticulous, partners who understood the challenges of inter-religious and interdisciplinary studies and allowed us the time and space we needed to get this conversation moving in a direction that is both exciting and fructifying. We hope that the success of our collaboration with MAVCOR Journal will inspire other specialists of non-Christian religions to consider the journal as a platform for their work to reach a broader audience that is both disciplined and open minded. 

• 1
  Anna Bigelow, ed. Islam Through Objects (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021).
• 2
  Asma Hilali, The Sanaa Palimpsest: The Transmission of the Qur’an in the First Centuries AH (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Charles Hirschkind, The Feeling of History: Islam, Romanticism, and Andalusia, (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2020); Irfana Hashmi, “The Development of a Locker System at al-Azhar,” Islamic Law and Society 25, no. 1-2 (2018): 11-36; Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, “Structuring Sovereignty: Islam and Modernity in the Mosque of Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha,” Material Religion 16, no. 3 (May 26, 2020): 317–44.
• 3
  Colleen McDannell, Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); David Morgan, The Embodied Eye: Religious Visual Culture and the Social Life of Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); Jonathan Bloom and Sheila Blair, eds., Islamic Art: Past, Present, Future (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019).
• 4
  Jamal J. Elias, Aisha’s Cushion: Religious Art, Perception, and Practice in Islam (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012); Christiane J. Gruber, The Praiseworthy One: The Prophet Muhammad in Islamic Texts and Images (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018).
• 5
  Leor Halevi, Modern Things on Trial: Islam’s Global and Material Reformation in the Age of Rida, 1865-1935 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021); Michael Muhammad Knight, Muhammad’s Body: Baraka Networks and the Prophetic Assemblage (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2020); Richard J. A. McGregor, Islam and the Devotional Object: Seeing Religion in Egypt and Syria (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

Bold, risky, and brash seem like unlikely tributes for a calligrapher’s work. The practice often evokes repetitive scribing of wedding invites, craftspeople rather than artists creatively playing with their texts. British calligrapher Donald Jackson’s The Black Cross invites you to look again.1  When it appeared in 1984, the British calligraphy and lettering arts scene was opening up to more expressive forms of text art alongside traditional lettering tasks. Today this piece resides at Saint Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral in Minneapolis, where it hangs prominently in the parlor. Looking back in 2021, Jackson described this piece as one of the most meaningful works of his career.2  It illustrates some of the ways contemporary calligraphic art engages sacred writ: through the interplay of word and image, recording the artist’s physical gestures, and making visible the divine.

The Black Cross began with a commission to create a piece based on the Nunc Dimittis (“Now, Lord, you may dismiss your servant”), Simeon’s canticle in the Gospel of Luke (2:29-32), traditionally prayed by monks during their day’s end Compline service. Jackson employs the translation in the 1662 Anglican Book of Common Prayer, with the Gloria added:

Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace : according to thy word.
For mine eyes have seen : thy salvation;
Which thou hast prepared : before the face of all people; 
To be a light to lighten the Gentiles : and to be the glory of thy people Israel.
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son : and to the Holy Ghost;
as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be : world without end. Amen.3

Jackson includes the prayer book’s verse breaks for chanting. This cues the viewer to think of the Lucan text along with its intended liturgical and musical performance during bedtime prayer, an hour evocative of death.4  The elderly Simeon had been promised that he would see the Messiah before his death. When he beheld the Christ Child in the Temple in Jerusalem, he sang this prophetic canticle and willingly surrendered his life. Jackson’s black cross imagery responds to these hallowed words.

• 1
  The Black Cross was commissioned for, and first published in Michael Taylor, ed., Contemporary British Lettering: A Collection of Newly Commissioned Work (London: Michael Taylor Rare Books, 1984). The artist has discussed it in Donald Jackson, Painting with Words: The Calligraphy of Donald Jackson (St. Paul, MN: The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1988), cat. no. 20; Donald Jackson, “Earning and Luck” (lecture, The Society for Calligraphy, September 4, 2021), hhttp://hdl.handle.net/10079/6438e7bd-f432-4b25-800c-4dca1b5bcc87. Jackson himself has shifted in how he refers to this piece. In his 1988 retrospective Painting with Words, he called it Nunc Dimittis and Gloria (emphasizing the text); in the 2021 lecture, he referred to it as The Black Cross (emphasizing the image).
• 2
  Jackson, “Earning and Luck.”
• 3
  The Church of England, “Nunc dimittis,” Common Worship: Services and Prayers for the Church of England, 2000, https://www.churchofengland.org/prayer-and-worship/worship-texts-and-resources/common-worship/common-material/canticles-main-18.
• 4
  Leonel L. Mitchell and Ruth A. Meyers, Praying Shapes Believing: A Theological Commentary on the Book of Common Prayer, rev. ed., Weil Series in Liturgics (New York: Seabury Books, 2016), 59.

Calligraphic art often plays with word and image—indeed, for the lettering artist, words are images. Jackson writes these Gospel lines in closely packed capital letters in a script he describes as “Uncialish,” evoking the wide, round capital letters most associated with early medieval Latin Bibles. I often suggest contemplating calligraphy upside down so the viewer can con­sider the visual texture of the letterforms without being distracted by reading them. Jackson weaves these words together in a dense block leaving little space between lines and characters. This imposes a kind of visual volume for a liturgical proclamation in the present tense. Jackson’s letters convey Simeon’s joy at seeing his life’s end fulfilled.

Those black and triumphant letters, present-tense affirmations, contrast with the shadowy cross. Jackson tells the story of how he made The Black Cross: he had created the lettering but put off completing the artwork.1  On the day the piece was due to the client, he walked into his yard, chopped a few fragments off a spare apple box, brought them to the studio, inked them, and pressed them onto the page, fading away at left and right. It strongly resembles the evanescent marks traced on the foreheads of the faithful on Ash Wednesday. This cross is crude and rectilinear compared to the elegant, rounded letterforms beneath.

Jackson’s choice of cheap, rough wood suggests the coarseness of death by crucifixion. Unlike the elegant, fine-grained wooden crosses in churches around the globe, the wood of the actual cross was not meant to display beauty. It was a torture device for a public spectacle of state power. It was utilitarian and discardable, like Jackson’s apple box. The artist captures that brutal sentence more evocatively by using actual wood than if he had used a brush to paint a simulacrum of wood.

Just as medieval illuminated manuscripts generate interplays of word and image, so Jackson’s work sparks a conversation between cross and the nunc dimittis. After his joyful prayer, Simeon turns to Mary and warns her that her son is “a sign that will be opposed” (2:34), that “a sword will piece your own soul too” (2:35). Even this early in Luke, even when Jesus is a mere baby, his torturous execution looms ahead. Later Christian exegetes such as John of Damascus and Bonaventure would link Simeon’s words more explicitly to the passion.2  The shadowy cross visually foreshadows death.

• 1
  Jackson, “Earning and Luck.”
• 2
  Arthur A. Just, ed., Luke, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: New Testament 3 (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 20), 50–51; Bonaventure, Commentary of the Gospel of Luke: Chapters 1-8, ed. Robert J. Karris, Works of St. Bonaventure 8, part 1 (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute Publications, 2001), 188–89.

When Jackson stamped the wood against the vellum, he had already penned the letters and there was no time for a do-over. He took a gamble. This piece’s intuitive process, its risky execution, make its meaning as much as the visuals. Jackson echoes Simeon’s own tension: the tension between the “peace and light” of the canticle and the “sword and suffering” of the warning to Mary.1  Jackson’s tension lies between the slow, careful quill strokes and the quick, bold placement of wood on vellum.

When speaking about calligraphy as an artform, Jackson often invites his audience to look at the writing and mentally follow in the movements of the scribe. The viewer can perceive a scribe who writes slowly, with caution and care for how he knits the letters and words together. He writes with intention. He is completely focused, like Simeon who is wholly devoted to “the consolation of Israel” (2:25). Upon holding the child, Simeon proclaims peace and light. He can now die consoled. Though the text does not name his age, Christian tradition often imagines him as an old man.2

After the careful lettering, Jackson chopped wood and laid its shards on his page, drawing inspiration from the seventeenth-century Japanese sculptor Enku who carved 120,000 wooden statues of the Buddha with confident, spontaneous cuts.3  As Jackson explained how he made this cross: “It just came . . . I felt that I just had a baby.”4  Jackson’s metaphor echoes Mary, mother of Jesus, who in Luke 1 quickly accepts Gabriel’s call even as events in Luke 2 underscore the risk and anguish of her fate. Here the violence of chopping wood recalls other forms of death required for this art, not least the calf upon whose skin this piece was written.5  The process of creation echoes the text: Jackson snaps wood and plops it on the page. Enku carves his Buddhas with knife strokes. Likewise, a sword will pierce the heart of Mary because of this child (2:35).

Jackson made this work at a time when Western calligraphers increasingly turned to East Asian styles, drawing inspiration from their counterparts’ emphasis on gesture, line, and movement.6  Kazuaki Tanahashi, a Japanese Zen teacher and calligrapher who came to the United States in the 1970s, played a key role. Tanahashi taught alongside Jackson at a major conference in 1984, and Jackson later wrote a glowing cover blurb for Tanahashi’s 1990 work Brush Mind which introduced Zen calligraphy to many Western scribes.7  Jackson may have encountered Enku’s work through Tanahashi’s 1982 book about the sculptor.8  The flow of calligraphic inspiration from East to West has grown immensely since 1984; The Black Cross marks an earlier point in that story. From Tanahashi and Enku, Jackson may have gained a deepened appreciation of movement, intuition, and risk. 

Like the pianist who spends months preparing for a concert only to find unplanned creative touches happening on the scheduled day, the calligrapher performs and improvises on the page with body, rhythm, and breath. As Jackson said of this piece and companion works when they were exhibited in 1988, “Our hearts as well as our minds are involved in our response to letters and their arrangement.”15

• 1
  François Bovon, Luke 1: A Commentary on the Gospel of Luke 1:1-9:50, ed. Helmut Koester, trans. Christine M. Thomas, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002), 104.
• 2
  Bonaventure, Commentary of the Gospel of Luke, 193.
• 3
  Jackson, Painting with Words.
• 4
  Jackson, “Earning and Luck.”
• 5
  Jonathan Homrighausen, Planting Letters and Weaving Lines: Calligraphy, The Song of Songs, and The Saint John’s Bible (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2022), 121­–28.
• 6
  Nicolette Gray, Lettering as Drawing (New York: Taplinger, 1982), 1–2; William Gunderson and Charles Lehman, The Calligraphy of Lloyd J. Reynolds, 2nd ed. (Portland, OR: Oregon Historical Society Press, 1989); Ewan Clayton, The Calligraphy of the Heart (Brighton, UK: self-published, 1996).
• 7
  Kazuaki Tanahashi, Brush Mind (Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1990).
• 8
  Kazuaki Tanahashi, Enku, Sculptor of a Hundred Thousand Buddhas (Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 1982).
• 15
  Jackson, Painting with Words.

After laying down the cross, Jackson created the golden circles and brush strokes around it. He calls these strokes “angels’ wings.” He crafted these wings by painting gesso (the binding agent which anchors gold leaf to vellum) with a coarse brush. Jackson’s use of gilding to depict angelic figures is a hallmark of his style, dating back at least as early as his 1976 Fear God and Give Glory to Him; many more appear in The Saint John’s Bible.1  By gilding the shape of an angel, Jackson both reveals and conceals their presence: the gold shines loudly on the page, but avoids anthropomorphic depictions of divine beings which can easily slide into kitsch. Just as the careful black letters contrast with the bold black cruciform, the golden circles’ perfect geometry balances the chaotic angels’ wings. 

As with the letters and the cross, the reader can imagine how Jackson moved his arm as he painted the gesso. Bonaventure goes so far as to say that Simeon was dancing for joy at sight of the Christ child.2  One can imagine the choreography of Jackson’s arm and brush, the upward flicks under the gold, the strokes which convey motion through their diagonal slants. As the viewer moves and light shines off these angels at different slants, the gilding appears to flicker like flame. The angels come to life.

Simeon proclaims he has seen God’s salvation; this piece visually presents redemption in the form of light. Simeon’s “light to lighten the Gentiles” draws on Jewish scriptures’ imagery of God as light, especially Isaiah: “Arise, shine; for your light has come” (60:1).3  Later in Luke, John the Baptist echoes Simeon when he declares that “all flesh shall see the salvation of God” (3:6). Biblically, seeing is believing; that which can be seen can also be a public sign “in the presence of all peoples” (Luke 2:31).4  For today’s Christian who cannot literally hold the infant Jesus like Simeon did or baptize him like John did, the gold in this composition makes shifting light visible in ways that inert ink and pigment do not.

The Black Cross has shone forth since its 1984 creation. Fourteen years later Jackson would commit to his career-defining commission, The Saint John’s Bible, an illuminated manuscript of the whole Catholic canon created under the direction of the Benedictine monks of Saint John’s Abbey in Minnesota, completed in 2011.5  The Black Cross presages the visual tropes of the massive Bible, especially Jackson’s use of gold and tendency toward abstraction. Further, the piece now lives in a cathedral, a liturgical space rather than an art museum. Parishioners sit near it as they meet and consult, and perhaps pause to read its words. People walk by it and see its gold from different angles. The Black Cross continues to make its light visible.6

• 1
  Jonathan Homrighausen, “Words Made Flesh: Incarnational, Multisensory Exegesis in Donald Jackson’s Biblical Art,” Religion and the Arts 23 (2019): 240–72, https://doi.org/10.1163/15685292-02303003.
• 2
  William Hyland, “Why Is Simeon Dancing? The Unity of Exegesis, Theology and Devotion in the Work of Bonaventure,” Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 19, no. 2 (2019): 271, 278, https://doi.org/10.1353/scs.2019.0031.
• 3
  See also Isaiah 60:19, 42:6-7, 49:6, 49:8-9, 51:4-5. Bovon, Luke 1, 102–3; John T. Carroll, Luke, New Testament Library (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2012), 78. On the metaphor of God as light more generally in the Hebrew Bible, see William P. Brown, Seeing the Psalms: A Theology of Metaphor (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), 81–104, 197–99.
• 4
  Brittany E. Wilson, The Embodied God: Seeing the Divine in Luke-Acts and the Early Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 201, 205–6; Yael Avrahami, The Senses of Scripture: Sensory Perception in the Hebrew Bible, LHBOTS 545 (New York: T&T Clark, 2012), 225–32.
• 5
  On The Saint John’s Bible, see Christopher Calderhead, Illuminating the Word: The Making of The Saint John’s Bible, 2nd ed. (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2015).
• 6
  I would like to thank George Greenia and Christopher Redmon for their comments on a draft of this article. I am also indebted to Mitch Rossow and to Linda Schelin of Saint Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral, Minneapolis, for arranging for me to have print-quality images of the piece.

The first time I saw the Bībī kā ʿalam was on a warm February afternoon in 2005 (Fig. 1). It was the beginning of Muharram, the first month of the Islamic lunar calendar when the Shiʿa remember and mourn the martyrdom of the third Imam, Husain, who, along with seventy-two of his supporters was killed in the Iraqi desert at a place called Karbala in 680 CE. I joined my colleague, Urdu scholar Amy Bard and two Hyderabadi women, Dr. Zakia Sultana, a geography professor at a local women’s college and prominent majlis orator (zākirah) and Dr. Shemeem, a leader of Yadgar-e Husaini, the women-only ʿāshūrkhānah (a ritual space discussed below), located in Purani Haveli, a Shiʿi neighborhood in Hyderabad’s Old City.1  Riding around in a pair of autorickshaws, we spent an afternoon visiting the many public and private ʿāshūrkhānahs in the Old City, where we paid our respects to these sacred objects.

We stopped in a narrow street outside a building concealed behind plain white walls, typical of much of the traditional architecture in the Old City. Walking through the gate, we entered into a large courtyard, bustling with activity. We had crossed a threshold where the dusty street with its honking horns and crowds of people gave way to a different sort of activity. People come from near and far to seek the intercession of Bibi Fatimah, the daughter of the Prophet Muhammad, wife of Imam ʿAli, and mother of the martyred Imam Husain. Men and women gathered around the alāvā, a large firepit, where for most of the days of Muharram, offerings of incense are made as a votive offering, part of prayers of supplication offered to Fatimah al-Zahra seeking her intercession (see Fig. 2).

• 1
  The majlis-e ʿazā is a commemorative mourning assembly that takes place during Muharram as well as at other times throughout the year to remember the martyrdom of the Imams and other members of the Ahl-e Bait. The majlis is presided over by a ẕākir (fem. ẕākirah, lit. “one who remembers”), who delivers a thematic discourse called the ẕikr (usually) related to the event being condoled. The discourse is divided into two parts, the first extolling the virtues of the martyr and the Ahl-e Bait, which draws on verses from the Qurʾan, poetry, hadith, and Shiʿi martyrdom narratives (maqtal). The second half of the discourse is called the maṣāʾib (suffering), which brings assembly participants to tears as the ẕākir describes the affliction and death of the martyr in simple, vivid, and deeply intimate language.

In Hyderabad, the capital of the southern state of Telangana with a booming population of more than ten million, the city’s Shiʿi population is but a fraction of the total, estimated in 2017 to be approximately 200,000.1  Hyderabad was founded in 1591 by Muhammad Quli (r. 1580–1612), the fifth sultan of the Qutb Shahi dynasty (r. ca. 1496–1687). Since the late-sixteenth century, when Muharram rituals came to be sponsored by the Qutb Shahi state, Muhammad Quli and his successor, the seventh sultan ʿAbdullah (r. 1626–1672) innovated architectural spaces for holding rituals, as well as new material and visual practices that allowed Imam Husain and his family to be absorbed into and appeal to diverse religious constituencies.2

Since the sixteenth century, the ʿalam has been the religious symbol par excellence for the Hyderabadi Shiʿa. In Hyderabad, Shiʿi religious life constellates around the ʿāshūrkhānah (“the house of the tenth”), a ritual space where mourning assemblies are held and ʿalams are raised during Muharram for devotees to venerate and seek their intercession.3  ‘Alams are made in all shapes, sizes, and designs. Some may be only a few inches in height and weigh mere ounces, while others may weigh dozens of pounds and be more than ten feet tall. ʿAlam design varies significantly between the major Shiʿi centers of Hyderabad, Lucknow, Lahore and Karachi, where their material composition, size, and the individuals they represent reflect the particularities of Shiʿi cultural memory. A popular ʿalam design found throughout the subcontinent is in the shape of an outstretched hand, known as a panjah, which variously represents Imam ʿAli or Imam Husain’s half-brother ʿAbbas ibn ʿAli, who is revered for his valiant attempt to collect water in a water-skin (mashk) at the banks of the Euphrates river, where soldiers from the ʿUmayyad caliph’s army severed each of his hands before ultimately decapitating him. Panjahs representing ʿAbbas often have a mashk on a chain suspended from the top of the ʿalam. ʿAlams are more than material representations of the individual that the object signifies; for South Asian Shiʿa the ʿalam is an embodiment of the Imam or member of the Ahl-e Bait (the family of the Prophet Muhammad) that it represents.4  The ʿalam is a materialization of the presence in absence of the Imams and Ahl-e Bait, with whom the Shiʿa can visually interact, to whom they can make supplicatory offerings and vows, and whose intercession can be sought. The ʿalam establishes an immediacy between object and devotee that precludes referring to an ʿalam as “it.” The Bībī kā ʿalam is a materialized embodiment of Fatimah, if only for the ten-day ritual period of Muharram, and she receives and reciprocates the devotional gaze of devotees, both Shiʿa and non-Shiʿa, who seek her intercession in solving problems of health, marriage, family, education, and work.

• 1
  “Hyderabad’s Shiʿa Community Ready for 10^th Muharram Procession” Business Standard, September 30, 2017, https://www.business-standard.com/article/news-ani/hyderabad-s-shia-community-ready-for-10th-muharram-procession-117093000582_1.html.
• 2
  Karen G. Ruffle, “Presence in Absence: The Formation of Reliquary Shiʿism in Qutb Shahi Hyderabad,” Material Religion 13, no. 3 (2017): 329-353.
• 3
  The ʿāshūrkhānah is a distinctly Deccani architectural form of Shiʿi religious architecture that is not found outside of South India, although diasporic Shiʿa are establishing domestic ʿāshūrkhānahs in their homes with ʿalams and other objects of devotion they have brought from their natal communities. During Muharram in other parts of India, including Lucknow, Delhi, and Mumbai, and in Karachi, Lahore, and Multan, Pakistan, mourning assemblies are held and ʿalams and taʿziya تعزيه (replica of Imam Husain’s Karbala shrine-tomb) are displayed in other types of religious buildings, notably the imāmbāṛā اٰمامباڑا (the enclosure of the Imam) and imāmbārgāh امامبارگاہ (the court of the Imam). For a discussion of Shiʿi religious architecture and ways space is materially and ritually engaged, see chapter three in my monograph Everyday Shiʿism in South Asia (Hoboken: Wiley, 2021).
• 4
  I am writing specifically about the meaning and function of the ʿalam in the South Asian Shiʿi context. I do not aim to speak generally for the signifying operation of the ʿalam in the broader Shiʿi world because such material practice and their rituals are co-constituted by normative sources and traditions that are produced by Shiʿas in everyday religious life.

Devotees may view the ʿalam, and access Fatimah’s intercessory powers and blessings, both within the ʿāshūrkhānah precincts and in her annual procession. On the afternoon of 10 Muharram, the Bībī kā ʿalam leaves the ʿāshūrkhānah in the Dabirpura neighborhood to undertake a grand, royal procession that makes its way through the Old City atop an elephant, where she can be seen by tens of thousands of devotees. Accompanying theʿalam in procession are associations (anjuman or gurūh) that perform various types of bloody self-flagellation (khūnī mātam) with their hands and implements to which chains and blades are attached (zanjīr zanī). Striking oneself on the chest for extended periods of time until the skin splits open, or lashing the back with chains and blades, drawing copious amounts of blood is an expression of Shiʿi love and loyalty to Fatimah al-Zahra and in recognition of the sacrifice of Fatimah’s son Husain on the Karbala battlefield in 680 CE. The elephant is accompanied by a rank of fourteen steel ʿalams of varying designs that are carried on extra-long poles (nāʾizah) (Fig. 5). The length of these poles serves to convey the status of the ʿalams and allows them to serve as clarions announcing the impending arrival of the exalted Bībī kā ʿalam. In Hyderabad, a nāʾizah’s length connotes an ʿalam’s status—the taller the pole, the more exalted the standard, exemplified by the naʿl-e mubārak ʿalam, containing Hyderabad’s oldest Shiʿi relic, a piece of Imam Husain’s helmet.1  Steel is associated with martial prowess, and the fourteen steel ʿalams that proceed the Bībī kā ʿalam have a dual signifying role. Primarily, they announce and serve as protective sentinels over the Bībī kā ʿalam’s movement through the Old City in her royal cortege. Secondarily, the number fourteen plays on Shiʿi number symbolism, invoking the “Fourteen Infallibles” (chārdah maʿṣūmīmth (e Prophet Muhammad, Fatimah, and the twelve Imams. 

• 1
  This relic was gifted to the fourth sultan, Ibrahim (r. 1550–1580), who had the relic fashioned into a calligraphic ʿalam in the form of the name Allah, which is covered with a thick layer of sandalwood paste. Ruffle, “Presence in Absence,” 339.

The Hyderabadi Shiʿa invoke the presence of the shāhzādī-ye kaunain, the Mistress of the Two Worlds (Fatimah), through a repertoire of rituals and material objects that emphasize her exalted status as the mother of the Imamate, the daughter of the Prophet Muhammad, and the caretaker of the house of sorrows (bait al-aḥzān) who bears witness to the tears shed by those loyal to her family and its cause.1  The Bībī kā ʿalam, the rituals that take place at its ʿāshūrkhānah, and the massive 10 Muharram procession, which has thrived for more than 350 years, reflect the deep traditions of devotion among the Hyderabadi Shiʿa to Fatimah’s intercessory powers as a saint endowed with the grace to intervene in the affairs of this world and the next. 

Image-objects such as the Bībī kā ʿalam are experienced at the intersection of what I have theorized elsewhere as the religious sensorium, “a symbolically rich religio-social space where ritual practitioners engage with material objects and the body to produce sense experiences,” which in the Shiʿi context brings collective memory of Karbala into the present.2  Both Shiʿi and Hindu devotees perform rituals of hospitality (making offerings and prayers of supplication) while participating in acts of reciprocal gazing with the Bībī kā ʿalam, whether installed in the ʿāshūrkhānah or taken out in grand procession on 10 Muharram. For Hindus, this ritual act is darśan, for Shiʿa, it is naẓar or dīdār. In both contexts it is an act of auspicious gazing with an object that the practitioner believes contains the embodiment of the god (Hindu context) or Imam (Shiʿi context), to whom greetings, prayers, offerings, and supplications must be made with the correct etiquette and purity of heart. Making supplicatory prayers, vows, and performing the rituals of “visitation” (ziyārat) are deeply personal acts of devotion that take place between a devotee and the Imam or member of the Prophet Muhammad’s family (the Ahl-e Bait), that the ʿalam represents. David Pinault has described Shiʿi acts of religious seeing as darśanic, fundamentally “imagistic in orientation.”3  In his work on immateriality and presence, Victor Buchli has argued that nearness “is achieved through an icon.”4  I agree with Pinault and Buchli’s assessment of the imagistic and proximal power the icon exerts over the devotee as “viewer,” however, this action is never one-sided, and it is enveloped in a web of other ritual acts and desires that activate the gaze and its intercessory response. Vows, supplications, and visitations to the Imams and Ahl-e Bait are intimately bound up in acts of mutual visual exchange before image-objects such as ʿalams and taʿziyas (replica of Imam Husain’s Karbala shrine-tomb) in Shiʿi South Asia. While Muharram is a period of mourning for the suffering and martyrdom of Imam Husain and his family at Karbala, it is also a time much anticipated by the Shiʿa, when gazing on the ʿalams affirms bonds of loyalty and love for members of the Ahl-e Bait, assuring their enduring presence in absence.

• 1
  For further discussion of the concept of the “house of sorrows,” see Mahmoud Ayoub, Redemptive Suffering in Islam: A Study of the Devotional Aspects of ʿĀshūrā’ in Twelver Shīʿism (The Hague: Mouton, 1978); regarding Fatimah’s intercessory powers, Karen G. Ruffle, “May Fatimah Gather Our Tears,” 386-397.
• 2
  Karen G. Ruffle, Everyday Shiʿism in South Asia, 166.
• 3
  David Pinault, Horse of Karbala: Muslim Devotional Life in India (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 18; see also Ruffle, “Gazing in the Eyes of the Martyrs,” 284.
• 4
  Victor Buchli, “Presencing the Im-Material,” In An Anthropology of Absence: Materializations of Transcendence and Loss, ed. Mikkel Bille, et al. (New York: Springer, 2010), 109.